
T^aOmy fmidb 



LIBRARY OF CONGRESS. 

UNITED STATES OF AMERICA. 



JAW .^ 1S87 



The Faith that 



Makes Faithful 



/ 



WILLIAM C. GANNETT and JBNKIN LLOTD JONES 
u 7. 



,1 



1 / 



So nigh is grandeur to our dust, 

So near is God to nnan, 
When Duty whispers low, Thou must. 

The youth replies, / can. 




CHICAGO 
CHARLES H. KERR & COMPANY 

1887 






Copyright, 1886, 
By Charles H. Kerb & Company. 



TO OUR YOKE-FELLOW 

JOHN CALVIN LEARNED 

WHOSE FAITHFULNESS IS WORKING FAITH 
IN MANY 



CONTBiq^TS. 

Page 

Blessed Be Drudgery. — W. C. G. - - - - - 1 

Faithfulness. — J. Ll. J. - - - - - - 16 

*a Had a Friend."~-W. C. G. - - - » . 30 

Tenderness. — J. Ll. J. - . . ^ . . 47 

A Cup of Cold Water.— W. C. G. - - - - 64 

The Seamless Robe.— J. Ll. J. - - - - 81 

Wrestling and Blesssing. — W. C. G. - - - - 96 

The Divine Benediction. — J. Ll. J. • - - « 114 



BLESSED BE DRUDGERY. 



Of every two men probably one man thinks lie is a drudge, 
and every second woman at times is sure sbe is. Either we 
are not doing the thing we would like to do in life; or, in 
what we do and like, we find so much to dislike, that the rut 
tires, even when the road runs on the whole a pleasant way. 
I am going to speak of the Culture that comes through 
this very Drudgery. 

" Culture through my drudgery !" some one is now think- 
ing : " This tread-mill that has worn me out, this grind I 
hate, this plod that, as long ago as I remember it, seemed 
tiresome, — to this have I owed ' culture' ? Keeping house 
or keeping accounts, tending babies, teaching primary 
school, weighing sugar and salt at a counter, those blue 
overalls in the machine-shop, — have these anything to do 
with ' culture' ? Culture takes leisure, elegance, wide mar- 
gins of time, a pocket-book : drudgery means , limitations, 
coarseness, crowded hours, chronic worry, old clothes, black 
hands, head-aches. Culture implies college : life allows a 
daily paper, a monthly magazine, the circulating library, 
and two gift-books at Christmas. Our real and our ideal 
are not twins: never were! I want the books, — but the 
clothes-basket wants me. The two children are good, — and 
so would be two hours a day without the children. I crave 
an out-door life, — and walk down town of mornings to perch 
on a high stool till supper-time. I love Nature, and figures 
are my fate. My taste is books, and I farm it. My taste is 
art, and I correct exercises. My taste is science, and I 



Z BLESSED BE DRUDGERY. 

measure tape. I am young and like stir : the business jogs 
on like a stage-coacli. Or I am not young, I am getting 
grey over my ears, and like to sit down and be still : but the 
drive of the business keeps both tired arms stretched out full 
length. I hate this overbidding and this underselling, this 
spry, unceasing competition, and would willingly give up 
a quarter of my profits to have two hours of my daylight 
to myself — at least I would if, working just as I do, I did 
not barely get the children bread and clothes. I did not 
choose my calling, but was dropped into it — ^by my innocent 
conceit — or by duty to the family — or by a parent's foolish 
pride — or by our hasty marriage ; or a mere accident wedged 
me into it. Would I could have my life over again ! Then, 
whatever I should be, at least I would not be what I am to- 
day!" 

Have I spoken truly for any one here ? I know I have. 
Goes not the grumble thus within the silent breast of many 
a person, whose pluck never lets it escape to words like 
these, save now and then of a tired evening to husband or to 
wife? 

There is often truth and justice in the grumble. Truth 
and justice, both. Still, when the question rises through 
the grumble. Can it be that this drudgery, not to be escaped, 
gives "culture"? the true answer is, — Yes, and culture of 
the prime elements of life ; of the very fundamentals of all 
fine manhood and fine womanhood. 

Our prime elements are due to our drudgery, — I mean 
that literally ; the fundamentals^ that underlie all fineness, 
and without which no other culture worth the winning is 
even possible. These, for instance, — and what names are 
more familiar ? Power of attention ; power of industry ; 
promptitude in beginning work ; method and accuracy and 
despatch in doing work ; perseverance ; courage before diffi- 
culties J cheer under straining burdens ; self-control and self- 



BLESSED BE DRUDGERY. 6 

denial and temperance. These are the prime qualities ; these 
the fundamentals. We have heard these names before ! 
When we were ^rnall, Mother had a way of harping on them, 
and Father joined in emphatically, and the minister used to 
refer to them in church. And this was what our first em- 
ployer meant, — only his way of putting the matter was, 
^' Look sharp, my boy ! " — ^' Be on time, John ! " — '' Stick to 
it !'* Yes, that is just what they all meant: these are the very 
qualities which the mothers tried to tuck into us when they 
tucked us into bed, the very qualities which the ministers 
pack into their platitudes, and which the nations pack into 
their proverbs. And that goes to show that they are the 
fundamentals. Reading, writing and arithmetic are very 
handy, but these fundamentals of a man are handier to have ; 
worth more ; worth more than Latin and Greek and French 
and German and music and art-history and painting and 
wax flowers and travels in Europe, added together. These 
last are the decorations of a man or woman : even reading 
and writing are but conveniences : those other things are the 
Indispensahles. They make one's sit-fast strength, and 
one's active momentum, whatsoever and wheresoever the lot 
in life be, — ^be it wealth or poverty, city or country, library 
or workshop. Those qualities make the solid substance of 
one's self. 

And the question I would ask of myself and you is, How 
do we get them ? How do they become ours ? High school 
and college can give much, but these are never on their pro- 
grammes. All the book-processes that we go to the schools 
for, and commonly call '' our education", give no more than 
opportunity to win these Indispensahles of education. How, 
then, do we get them? We get them somewhat as the fields 
and valleys get their grace. Whence is it that the lines of 
river and meadow and hill and lake and shore conspire to- 
day to make the landscape beautiful ? Only by long chisel- 



4 BLESSED BE DRUDGERY. 

lings and steady pressures. Only by ages of glacier-crush 
and grind, by scour of floods, by centuries of storm and sun. 
These rounded the hills, and scooped the valley-curves, and 
mellowed the soil for meadow-grace. There was little grace 
in the operation, had we been there to watch. It was 
'' drudgery" all over the land. Mother Nature was down on 
her knees doing her early scrubbing- work ! That was yes- 
terday : to-day, result of scrubbing- work, we have the laugh- 
ing landscape. 

Now what is true of the earth is true of each man and 
woman on the earth. Father and mother and the ancestors 
before them have done much to bequeath those elemental 
qualities to us ; but that which scrubs them into us, the 
clinch which makes them actually ours, and keeps them ours, 
and adds to them as the years go by, — that depends on our 
own plod, our plod in the rut, our drill of habit ; in one 
word, depends upon our " drudgery." It is because we have 
to go, and go^ morning after morning, through rain, through 
shine, through tooth-ache, head-ache, heart-ache to the ap- 
pointed spot, and do the appointed work; because, and only 
because, we have to stick to that work through the eight or 
ten hours,, long after rest would be so sweet ; because the 
school-boy's lesson must be learnt at nine o'clock and learnt 
without a slip ; because the accounts on the ledger must 
square to a cent ; because the goods must tally exactly with 
the invoice ; because good temper must be kept with chil- 
dren, customers, neighbors, not seven, but seventy times 
seven times ; because the besetting sin must be watched 
to-day, to-morrow, and the next day ; in short, without 
LQuch matter what our work be, whether this or that, it is 
because, and only because, of the rut, plod, grind, hum-drum 
ill the work, that we at last get those self-foundations laid of 
which I spoke, — attention, promptness, accuracy, firmness, 
patience^ sclf-deiiial, aud the rest. When I think over that 



BLESSED BE DRUDGERY. 



list and seriously ask myself tliree questions, I have to 
answer each with iYo ; — Are there any qualities in the list 
which I can afford to spare, to go without, as mere show- 
qualities ? Not one. Can I get these self-foundations laid, 
save by the weight, year in, year out, of the steady pres- 
sures ? No, there is no other way. Is there a single one 
in the list which I can not get in some degree by undergoing 
the steady drills and pressures ? No, not one. Then be- 
yond all books, beyond all class-work at the school, beyond 
all special opportunities of what I call my " education", it 
is this drill and pressure of my daily task that is my great 
school-master. My daily tash^ whatever it be, that is what 
mainly educates me. All other culture is mere luxury 
compared with what that gives. That gives the Indispen- 
sables. Yet, fool that I am, this pressure of my daily task 
is the very thing that I so growl at as my " Drudgery" ! 

We can add right here this fact, and practically it is a 
very important fact to girls and boys as ambitious as they 
ought to be, — the higher our ideals, the more we need those 
foundation habits strong. The street-cleaner can better 
afford to drink and laze than he who would make good shoes; 
and to make good shoes takes less force of character and 
brain than to make cures in the sick-room, or laws in the 
legislature, or children in the nursery. The man who makes 
the head of a pin or the split of a pen all day long, and the 
man who must put fresh thought into his work at every 
stroke, — which of the two more needs the self-control, the 
method, the accuracy, the power of attention and concentra- 
tion ? Do you sigh for books and leisure and wealth ? It 
takes more " concentration" to use books — head-tools — well 
than to use hand-tools. It takes more '^ self-control" to use 
leisure well than work-days. Compare the Sundays and 
Mondays of your city ; which day, all things considered, 
stands for the city's higher life, — the day on which so many 



6 BLESSED BE DRUDGERY, 

men are lolling, or the day on whicli all toil ? It takes 
more knowledge, more integrity, more justice, to handle 
riches well than to bear the healthy pinch of the just- 
enough. 

Do you think that the great and famous escape drudgery ? 
The native power and temperament, the outfit and capital 
at birth, counts for much, but it convicts us common minds 
of huge mistake to hear the uniform testimony of the more 
successful geniuses about their genius. ' ' Genius is patience,' ' 
said who ? Sir Isaac Newton. '■ ' The Prime Minister's secret 
is patience", said who ? Mr. Pitt, the great Prime Minister 
of England. Who, think you, wrote, ^' My imagination 
would never have served me as it has, but for the habit of 
common-place, humble, patient, daily, toiling, drudging at- 
tention " ? It was Charles Dickens. Who said, " The secret 
of a Wall-street million is common honesty" ? Vander- 
bilt ; and he added as the recipe for a million (I know some- 
body would like to learn it), ''Never use what is not your 
own, never buy what you cannot pay for, never sell what you 
haven't got." How simple great men's rules are ! How 
easy it is to be a great man ! Order, diligence, patience, 
honesty, — just what you and I must use in order to put our 
dollar in the savings-bank, to do our school-boy sum, to keep 
the farm thrifty, and the house clean, and the babies neat. 
Order, diligence, patience, honesty ! There is wide differ- 
ence between men, but truly it lies less in some special gift 
or opportunity granted to one and withheld from another, 
than in the differing degree in which these common elements 
of human power are owned and used. Not how much 
talent have I, but how much will to use the talent that I 
liave, is the main question. • Not how much do I know, but 
how much do I do with what I know? To do their great 
work the great ones need more of the very same habits 
which the little ones need to do their smaller work. Goethe, 



BLESSED BE DRUDGERY. 7 

Spencer, Agassiz, Jesus, share, not achievements, but con- 
ditions of achievement, with you and me. And those con- 
ditions for them, as for us, are largely the plod, the drill, 
the long disciplines of toil. If we ask such men their 
secret, they will uniformly tell us so. 

Since we lay the firm substrata of ourselves in this way, 
then, and only in this way; and since the higher we aim, the 
more, and not the less, we need these firm substrata, — since 
this is so, I think we ought to make up our minds and our 
mouths to sing a hallelujah unto Drudgery: Blessed he 
Drudgery^ — the one thing that we can not spare ! 

II. 

But there is something else to be said. Among the people 
who are drudges, there are some who have given up their 
dreams of what, when younger, they used to talk or think 
about as their " ideals" ; and have grown at last, if not con- 
tent, resigned to do the actual work before them. Yes, 
here it is, — before us, and behind us, and on all sides of us ; 
we can not change it ; we have accepted it. Still, we have not 
given up one dream, — the dream of success in this work to 
which we are so clamped. If we can not win the well-beloved 
one, then success with the ill-beloved, — this at least is left 
to hope for. Success may make it well-beloved, too, — who 
knows ? Well, the secret of this Success still lies in the 
same old word, '^ Drudgery". For drudgery is the doing 
of one thing, one thing, one thing, long after it ceases to be 
amusing; and it is this "one thing I do" that gathers me 
together from my chaos, that concentrates me from possibili- 
ties, to powers, and turns powers into achievements. "One 
thing I do," said Paul, and, apart from what his one thing was, 
in that phrase he gave the watchword of salvation. That 
whole long string of habits, — attention, method, patience, 
self-control, and the others, — can be rolled up and balled, as 



8 BLESSED BE DRUDGERY. 

it were, in the word ^' concentration". We will halt a mo- 
ment at the word : — 

*' I give you the end of a golden string : 
Only wind it into a ball, — 
It will lead you in at Heaven's gate 
Built in Jerusalem's wall." 

Men may be divided into two classes, — those who have a 
"one thing", and those who have no "one thing", to do; 
those with aim, and those without aim, in their lives : and 
practically it turns out that almost all of the success, and 
therefore the greater part of the happiness, go to the first 
class. The aim in life is what the back-bone is in the body : 
without it we are invertebrate, belong to some lower order 
of being not yet man. No wonder that the great question 
therefore with a young man is. What am I to be ? and that 
the future looks rather gloomy until the life-path opens. 
The lot of many a girl, especially of many a girl with a 
rich father, is a tragedy of aimlessness. Social standards, 
and her lack of true ideals and of real education, have con- 
demned her to be frittered : from twelve years old she is a 
cripple to be pitied, and by thirty she comes to know it. 
With the brothers the blame is more their own. The boys 
we used to play our school-games with have found their 
places ; they are winning homes and influence and money, 
their natures are growing strong and shapely, and their 
days are filling with the happy sense of accomplishment, — 
while we do not yet know what we are. We have no mean- 
ing on the earth. Lose us, and the earth has lost nothing ; 
no niche is empty, no force has ceased to play, for we have 
got no aim and therefore, we are still — nobody. Get yoiw 
rueaning^ first of all ! Ask the question until it is answer- 
ed past question, What am I ? What do I stand for ^, 
What name do I bear in the register of forces ? In our 
national cemeteries there are rows on rows of unknown 



BLESSED BE DRUDGERY. 9^ 

bodies of our soldiers, — men wlio did a work and put a mean- 
ing to their lives ; for the aiotlier and the townsmen say, 
^' He died in the war." But the men and women whose 
lives are aimless, reverse their fate. Our bodies are known, 
and answer in this world to such or such a name, — but as 
to our inner selves^ with real and awful meaning our walking 
bodies might be labeled, " An unknown man sleeps here 1'* 

Now since it is concentration that prevents this tragedy 
of failure, and since this concentration always involves 
Drudgery, long, hard, abundant, we have to own again, I 
think, that that is even more than what I called it first, — 
our chief school-master ; besides that. Drudgery is the gray 
Angel of Success. The main secret of any success we may 
hope to rejoice in, is in that angel's keeping. Look at the 
leaders in the professions, the ^' solid" men in business, the 
master-workmen who begin as poor boys and end by build- 
ing a town in which to house their factory-hands ; they are 
drudges of the single aim. The man of science, and to-day 
more than ever, if he would add to the world's knowledge 
or even get a reputation, must be, in some one branch at 
least, a plodding specialist. The great inventors, Palissy at 
his pots, Goodyear at his rubber, Elias Howe at his sewing- 
machine, tell the secret, — " One thing I do." The reformer's 
secret is the same. A one-eyed, grim-jawed folk the re- 
formers are apt to be : one-eyed, grim-jawed, seeing but 
the one thing, never letting go, they have to be, to start a 
torpid nation. All these men as doers of the single thing 
drudge their way to their success. Even so must we, would 
we win ours. The foot-loose man is not the enviable man. 
A wise man will be his own necessity and bind himself to 
a task, if by early wealth or fooHsh parents or other lower- 
ing circumstances he has lost the help of an outward neces- 
sity. Dale Owen in his autobiography told the story 
of a foot-loose man, ruined by his happy circumstances. 



10 BLESSED BE DRUDGERY. 

It was his father's friend, one born to princely fortune, 
educated with the best, married happily, with children grow- 
ing up around him. All that health and wealth and leisure 
and taste could give were his. Robert Owen, an incessant 
worker, once went to spend a rare rest-moment with him at 
his country-seat, one of the great English parks. To the 
tired man, who had earned the peace, the quiet days seemed 
perfect, and at last he said to his host, " I have been think- 
ing that, if I ever met a man who had nothing to desire, 
you must be he : are you not completely happy ?" The 
answer came: ^^ Happy! Ah, Mr. Owen, I committed 
one fatal error in my youth, and dearly have I paid for it ! 
I started in life without an object, almost without an ambi- 
tion. I said to myself, ^ I have all that I see others con- 
tending for ; why should I struggle ?' I knew not the 
curse that lights on those who have never to struggle for 
anything. I ought to have created for myself some definite 
pursuit, no matter what, so that there would be something 
to labor for and to overcome. Then I might have been 
happy." Said Owen to him, ^' Come and spend a month 
with me at Braxfield. You have a larger share in the mills 
than any of us partners. Come and see for yourself what 
has been done for the work-people there and for their chil- 
dren; and give mje your aid." ''It is too late," was the 
reply; " the power is gone. Habits are become chains. 
You can work and do good ; but for one^ — in all the profitless 
years gone by I seek vainly for something to remember with 
pride, or even to dwell on with satisfaction. I have thrown 
away a life." — And he had only one life in this world to 
lose. 

Again then, I say. Let us sing a hallelujah and make a 
fresh beatitude : Blessed he Drudgery I It is the one thing 
we can not spare. 




BLESSED BE DRUDGERY. 11 



III. 



This is a hard gospel, is it Dot ? But now there is a 
pleasanter word to briefly say. To lay the firm foundations 
in ourselves, or even to win success in life, we must be 
drudges. But we can be artists^ also, in our daily task. 
And at that word things brighten. 

^^Artists", I say, — notartisans. ^' Thedifference ?" This : 
the artist is he who strives to perfect his work, — the artisan 
strives to get through it. The artist would fain finish, too; 
but with him it is to '^finish the work Grod has given me to 
do !" It is not how great a thing we do, but how well we do 
the thing we have to, that puts us in the noble brotherhood 
of artists. My Real is not my Ideal, — is that my com- 
plaint ? One thing at least is in my power : if I can not 
realize my Ideal, I can at least idealize my Real, How ? 
By trying to be perfect in it. If I am but a rain-drop, in a 
shower, I will be at least a perfect drop ; if but a leaf in a 
whole June, I will be at least a perfect leaf. This poor *'one 
thing I do," — instead of repining at its lowness or its hard- 
ness, I will make it glorious by my supreme loyalty to its 
demand. 

An artist himself shall speak. It was Michael Angelo 
who said, " Nothing makes the soul so pure, so religious, as 
the endeavor to create something perfect : for Grod is per- 
fection, and whoever strives for it strives for something that 
is God-like. True painting is only an image of God's per- 
fection, — a shadow of the pencil with which he paints, a 
melody, a striving after harmony." The great masters in 
music, the great masters in all that we call artistry, would 
echo Michael Angelo in this; he speaks the artist-essence out. 
But what holds good upon their grand scale and with those 
whose names are known, holds equally good of all pursuits 
and all lives. That true painting is an image of God's per- 
fection must be true, if he says so ; but no more true of 



12 BLESSED BE DRUDGERY. 

painting than of slioe-makiug, of Michael Angelo tlian of 
John Pounds the cobbler. I asked a cobbler once how long 
it took to become a good shoe maker; he answered promptly, 
*'Six years, — and then you must travel." That cobbler 
had the artist-souL I told a friend the story and he asked 
his cobbler the same question, How long does it take to be- 
come a good shoe maker ? '' All your life, sir." That was 
still better, — a Michael Angelo of shoes ! Mr. Maydole, the 
hammer-maker of central New York, was an artist: ^' Yes", 
said he to Mr. Parton, " I have made hammers here for 
twenty-eight years". " Well, then, you ought to be able 
to make a pretty good hammer by this time." "No, sir", 
was the answer, "I never made a pretty good hammer. 
I make the best hammer made in the United States." Dan- 
iel Morell, once president of the Cambria rail-works in 
Pittsburg, which employed seven thousand men, was an 
artist, and trained artists. '' What is the secret of such a 
development of business as this ?" asked the visitor. "We 
have no secret", was the answer; "we always try to beat our 
last batch of rails. That's all the secret we have, and we 
don't care who knows it." The Paris book-binder was an 
artist, who, when the rare volume of Corneille, discovered 
in a book-stall, was brought to him, and he was asked how 
long it would take him to bind it, answered, " Oh, sir, you 
must give me a year at least ; this needs all my care." Our 
Ben Franklin showed the artist, when he began his own 
epitaph, " Benjamin Franklin, printer." And Professor 
Agassiz, when he told the interviewer that he had "no time 
to make money"; and when he began his will, "I, Louis 
Agassiz, teacher." 

In one of Murillo's pictures in the Louvre he shows us 
the interior of a convent kitchen ; but doing the work 
there are, not mortals in old dresses, but beautiful white- 
winged angels. One serenely puts the kettle on the fire 



¥ 



BLESSED BE DRUDGERY. 13 



to boil, and one is lifting up a pail of water with heavenly 
grace, and one is at the kitchen-dresser reaching up for 
plates; and I believe there is a little cherub running about 
and getting in the way, trying to help. What the old 
monkish legend that it represented is, I do not know. But 
as the painter puts it to you on his canvas, all are so busy, 
and working with such a will, and so refining the work as 
they do it, that somehow you forget that pans are pans and 
pots pots, and only think of the angels, and how very 
natural and beautiful kitchen-work is, — just what the angels 
would do, of course. 

It is the angel-aim and standard in an act that conse- 
crates it. He who aims for perfectness in a trifle is trying 
to do that trifle holily. The trier wears the halo, and 
therefore the halo grows as quickly round the brows of 
peasant as of kingo This aspiration to do perfectly, — is it 
not religion practicalized ? If we use the name of G od, 
is this not God's presence becoming actor in us? No need, 
then, of being "great" to share that aspiration and that 
presence. The smallest roadside pool has its water from 
heaven and its gleam from the sun, and can hold the stars 
in its bosom, as well as the great ocean. Even so the hum- 
blest man or woman can live splendidly ! That is the royal 
truth that we need to believe, you and I who have no 
"mission", and no great sphere to move in. The universe 
is not quite complete without my work well done. Have 
you ever read George Eliot's poem called " Stradivarius" ? 
Stradivarius was the famous old violin-maker, whose violins, 
nearly two centuries old, are almost worth their weight in 
gold to-day. Says Stradivarius in the poem, — 
" If my hand slacked, 

I should rob God, — since he is fullest good, — 

Leaving a blank instead of violins. ; 

He could not make Antonio Stradivari's violins 

Without Antonio," 



14 BLESSED BE DRUDGERY. 

That is just as true of us as of our greatest brothers. 
What, stand with slackened hands and fallen heart before 
the littleness of your service ! Too little, is it, to be perfect 
in it ? Would you, then, if you were Master, risk a greater 
treasure in the hands of such a man ? Oh, there is no man, 
no woman, so small that they can not make their life great 
by high endeavor; no sick crippled child on its bed that 
can not fill a niche of service that way in the world. This 
is the beginning of all Gospels, — that the kingdom of heaven 
is at hand just where ice are. It is just as near us as our 
work is, for the gate of heaven for each soul lies in the 
endeavor to do that work perfectly. 

But to bend this talk back to the word with which we 
started : will this striving for perfection in the httle thing 
give '^ culture" ? Have you ever watched such striving in 
operation? Have you never met humble men and women 
who read little, who knew little, yet who had a certain 
fascination as of fineness lurking about them? Know them, 
and you are likely to find them persons who have put so much 
thought and honesty and conscientious trying into their 
common work, — ^it may be sweeping rooms, or planing 
boards, or painting walls, — have put their ideals so long, so 
constantly, so lovingly into that common work of theirs, 
that finally these qualities have come to permeate not their 
work only, but so much of their being, that they are fine- 
fibred within even if, on the outside the rough bark clicgs. 
Without being schooled, they are apt to instinctively detect 
a sham, — one test of culture. Without haunting the draw- 
ing-rooms, they are likely to have manners of quaint grace 
and graciousness, — another test of culture. Without the 
singing-lessons, their tones are apt to be gentle, — another 
test of culture. Without knowing anything about Art, so- 
called, they know and love the best in one thing, — are artists 
in their own little specialty of work. They make good com- 



BLESSED BE DRUDGERY. 15 

pany, these men and women, — why? Because, not having 
been able to realize their Ideal, they have idealized their 
Real, and thus in the depths of their nature have won true 
'- culture". 

You know all Beatitudes are based on something hard to 
do or to be. '' Blessed are the meek" : is it easy to be meek ? 
"Blessed are the pure in heart": is that so very easy? 
* ^ Blessed are they who mourn . " " Blessed are they who hun- 
ger and thirst — who starve — after righteousness." So this 
new beatitude by its hardness only falls into line with all 
the rest. A third time and heartily I say it, — ''Blessed be 
Drudgery!" For thrice it blesses us: it gives us the fun- 
damental qualities of manhood and womanhood; it gives us 
success in the thing we have to do; and it makes us, if we 
choose, artists, — artists within, whatever our outward work 
may be. Blessed he Drudgery^ — the secret of all Culture ! 



FAITHFULNESS. 



She hath done what she could. — Mark xiv : 8. 

And yet how little it was that she did do ! Look at the 
two figures in this picture, and mark the contrast. On this 
hand one of the great world-reformers, the founder of 
Christianity, is being caught in the clutches of maddened 
bigotry. He is spit upon and threatened by the presump- 
tuous dignitaries of the land. He is scorned by the schol- 
arly, almost forsaken by his friends, probably abandoned 
by his relations, — save that one who never ceases to cling 
to the most forsaken child of earth, — the mother. The 
fate of an evil-doer is bearing down upon him, the inevita- 
ble agony of the cross is before him, there seems to be no 
honorable chance of escape. There is no effort being made 
to save him. 

On that hand is a poor, weak, unnamed and unheralded 
woman ; a woman with little influence and less means. Her 
vision is necessarily very limited. She can poorly under- 
stand the questions at issue. What does she know of the 
philosophies and the theologies, the law and the prophets 
which engage the attention of the excited and disputing 
groups at the street corners ? She can plan no release, she 
can frame no defense, she can not speak a word in his justi- 
fication. Limited so in time, strength, means, influence 
and knowledge, what can she do ? 

She can love him. She can give of her heart's best af- 
fection. She can be true to that inexpressible attraction, that 
towering nobility that she feels. She knows that the gentle 
one is hated. She can read sorrow upon his benign face ; 
she can discover loneliness in his tender eyes, and she can 



FAITHFULNESS. 17 

take his side. She dares cling to him in the face of deri- 
sion and weep for him in defiance to the mocking crowd. 
She can with willing hands bring what seems to her 
to be the only precious thing in her possession. She can 
break the flask that contains what is probably her own buri- 
al ointment upon his head. This she can do, and how 
little it seems ! She dreams of no future fame for him oi 
for herself. She knows little of the poetic significance or 
symbolic fitness of the act. Merited seems the contempt 
of the lookers-on. Why the approving words of Jesus ? Why 
the perpetuation of the story ? Because she gave all she 
had ; she said all she knew ; she loved with all her heart. 
Because she *' did what she could.'' Can mind conceive oi 
higher commendation than this ? Where is the hero of 
successful wars, the explorer of unknown countries ; where 
is the capitalist who has established commerce, encouraged 
industries, founded homes for the needy or schools for the 
ignorant ; where is the statesman who has blessed his nation: 
the philanthropist who has lifted burdens from the oppress- 
ed ; the moralist who has saved souls from sin, dried up 
cesspools of human corruption, lifted the inebriate into 
sobriety ; where is the prophet of religion who has led 
souls heaven-ward and touched restless hearts with the 
peace of God, that deserves any higher commendation than 
this unnamed woman of Bethany ? She did what she could : 
none of those could do more. While that woman's tears 
fell upon the head of the persecuted, and her fingers passed 
through the ringlets on the brow that was so soon to be 
pierced by the thorns in the derisive crown, she was the 
peer of the noblest child of God. During that brief mo- 
ment, at least, the anointed and the anointer stood on a 
common level ; they were equal children of the Most High, 
she did what she could^ and the very Lord from heaven 
could do no more. 



18 FAITHFULNESS. 

" She hath done what she could." This is not the t^xt 
but the sermon. There is scarcely need of expansion. 
The heart promptly enlarges upon it, applications rush 
through the mind, and the conscience recognizes the test and 
asks, — How far do we deserve this enviable commendation 
that was given to the Bethany woman? Are we doing 
what we can, as she did, to defend the right and encourage 
the dutiful ? Are we doing all we can to console the out- 
cast and the despondent around us? Are we doing what 
we canto elevate our lives and to ennoble our calling? Are 
we doing simply what we can to stem the subtle tide of 
corruption, to stay the insidious currents of dissipation that 
eddy about us as they did the Bethany woman of long ago ? 
This story comes to us with its searching questions, measur- 
ing our efforts to resist the fiood of grossness, sectarian pride 
and arrogance that seeks to overwhelm gentleness, tender 
feeling and loving thought, here and now in America as 
then and there in Judea. 

Young men and women, the sermon of the hour for you 
is in the words ^^She hath done what she could." Let it 
preach to you of the work you have to do in these high and 
rare years of youth that are so rapidly gliding by. Do what 
you can towards bringing out the noblest possibilities of 
your nature. Do what you can to think high thoughts, to 
love true things and to do noble deeds. Temptations beset 
you like those that have filled hearts as light as yours with 
inexpressible sorrow. Are you doing what you can to make 
yourself strong to resist them? Before you hang the gilded 
trinkets of fashion, the embroidered banners of selfish lives. 
Do what you can to live for higher aims than these. Your 
lives are growing riper, your heads are growing wiser. Are 
you doing what you can to balance this with growth of 
heart, making the affections as much richer and warmer ; 
the conscience, Grod's best gift to man, brighter and more 



FAITHFULNESS. 19 

commanding? Are you doing what you can to follow your 
truest and to do your best? 

Mothers, you dream of homes made sacred by holy in- 
fluences into which the dwarfing excitements of superficial 
life, fashion and sensation, that so endanger your children, 
may not enter ; are you doing all you can to realize this 
dream? 

Fathers, are you doing what you can towards leaving your 
children that inestimable heritage, a noble example; the 
record of a life of uncompromising integrity, a sublime de- 
votion to truth, a quiet but never failing loyalty to con- 
science ? 

To all of us, young and old, men and women, this scene 
in the house of Simon the Leper comes across the feverish 
centuries with its quiet sermon, asking us if we are as faith- 
ful to the best impulses of our natures as this woman was 
to hers ; if we are doing what we can to testify to the gos- 
pel of love and patience, working with all the power we 
have to dispel the clouds of superstition that overhang the 
world ; doing the little we can to break the fetters of bigotry, 
to increase the love and good will of the world ; towards 
making our religion a life and our life in turn a religion of 
love and self-sacrifice. Are we breaking a single flask of 
precious ointment in disinterested self-forgetfulness in behalf 
of any oppressed and injured child of the Eternal Father? 
Are we simply striving the best we may to 

^*Look up and not down, 
Look out and not in, 
Look forward and not back, 
And lend a hand' '? 

Now, as then, the real struggle of life is not for bread 
and clothing, but for ideas, for truth and purity ; into this 
higher struggle this peasant woman of Bethany entered and 
did what she could. Are we doing as much ? 



20 FAITHFULNESS. 

Alas ! the sad truth is too patent to need statement. Rare 
are the souls who Hve on these Bethany heights of conse- 
cration and good will. ' The humiliating confession is forced 
from our lips that none of us do all that we can for these 
high things ; and the second question of our sermon presses. 
— Why is it thus ? And to this I find two fatal and almost 
universal answers, namely: 

1. We hardly think it worth while, because what we can 
do is so httle. 

2. We are ashamed to try, for fear people will laugh at 
us. 

Let us look to these answers : Fhst, then, we hardly 
think it pays ; we doubt if anything is accomplished. We 
have so little faith in the efficacy of all that we can do. This 
is becau-se we are still in the bondage of matter. We are 
still enslaved in the feeling that the material quantity is of 
more importance than the spiritual quality of our hves. We 
forget that it is not what but how we do, that determines 
our character. The Almighty in His providence does not 
ask of us uniform rents for our rights and lives, ?^s earthly 
landlords sometimes do. He only asks for the rightful use 
of the talents entrusted to us. The taxes of Heaven are never 
'per capita^ but always pro rata. Not the formal observ- 
ance of each and all alike, but every heart's best love, every 
hand's readiest service. Not the number of acres you till , but 
the quahty of your tilling, determines the profit of the har- 
vest in spiritual as in material farming. This standard ex- 
acts no promises, but it accepts no apologies, for there is no 
occasion for apology when you have done all you can, and 
until that is done no apologies are accepted. ^'Oh, if I were 
not so poor, had more time, strength or money!" Hush! 
from the loyal Bethany sister comes the gentle rebuke, "She 
hath done what she could," do thou as much and cease your 
bemoaning. But you say, "I would so like to build a 



ITAITHFULNESS* 21 

cliurcli, to establisli a hospital, to found a home for the 
afflicted, if I only could." Not you, unless out of your 
present revenue you have a tear for the unfortunate, a hope 
in your heart for him who has no hope for himself, a smile 
and a word for the sad and lonely that go about you ; or 
should you build a hospital or found a home, they would 
scarcely carry a blessing, for within their walls there would 
be no aroma of the precious ointment drawn from the flask 
of holy sacrifice. It is the fragrance of consecrated souls 
alone that is helpful. This age is in danger of being cursed 
with too many so-called ^'charitable" institutions, built with 
the refuse of rich men's pocket-books, the rag ends of selfish 
fortunes ; ^'institutions" with no cement stronger than the 
mason's mortar to keep the walls together ; institutions in 
which there is no heat to protect them from winter's cold 
save that which comes from a furnace in the cellar, and no 
cooling balm in summer to allay the feverish pulse save 
that found in a physician's prescription ; no religious conse- 
cration, no precious ointment poured by hands willing to do 
all they can. 

*'If I only had speech and the knowledge adequate I 
would so gladly testify to the faith that is in me ; I would 
advocate the precious doctrine — ^but — ^but — " 

Hold, restrain the impiety of that ^'but." " She hath 
done what she could." An advocacy more eloquent than 
speech is possible to you. A kind heart is a better vindi- 
cation of your doctrine than any argument. Deeds go 
further than words in justifying your creed. Character and 
not logic are the credentials to be offered at Heaven's gate ; 
conduct is higher than confession; being more fundamental 
than doing. ''She hath done what she could." There is a 
potency in this standard greater than in any of your dogmas ; 
a salvation higher than can be found in words or forms, how-^ 
ever high or noble. 



09 



PAlTHiTlNESS, 



The master voice of Jesus in this sentence pleads with 
us to put no skeptical measure upon the power of a loving 
soul, the strength of a willing heart. The power of that Beth- 
any woman is an open secret : the fame that came unsought 
is but the worlds glad tribute to the forces it most loves. 
This standard always partakes of the inspiration of the 
Most High. Friends, we have not faith enough in the 
far-reaching power of every soul's best. Tou recall the 
dark days of 1S61 to IS 65, the time when the nation was 
being riddled by traitorous bullets, when acres of southern 
soil were being covered by the bleeding sons of the Xorth. 
They were days when school-boys were translated into 
heroes, by the tap of a drum, ploughmen were transformed 
into field marshals, women were stirred with more than 
masculine heroism, as the avenues of war became clogged 
with their commerce of love. How their fingers flew, how 
the supphes of lint, bandages and delicacies poured in from 
hamlet and country-side ! Then there was none too weak, 
too busy or too poor to make a contribution to that tiding 
life that made the atrocities of war contribute to the 
gospel of peace, and used the horrors of the battle-field to 
teach the sweet humanities. 

Thii'ty-five years ago. miQions of human beings were 
chained in slavery in America. They were diiven to the 
auction block like fettered cattle, the sanctities of home were 
ruthlessly violated, the sacred rights of the human soul were 
trampled upon, and all this sanctioned by intelligent com- 
moEwealths, and authorized by a powerful government. 

What could an unknown printer do, what could a New 
England matron distracted by domestic cares, surrounded 
by a houseful of children, accomplish ? They could open 
their hearts and let the woes of their fellow-beings in, they 
could imitate the Bethany woman and do all they could, 
and tliis became the mighty inspiration which gave to our 



FAITHFULNESS. 23 

country William Lloyd Grarrison, its greatest moral hero, and 
^' Uncle Tom's Cabin", its greatest novel and most famous 
and prolific book. 

Miserable indeed were the prison pens of Europe a cen- 
tury ago ; barbarous was the treatment of the vicious ; 
arbitrary, cruel, and oftentimes stupid and brutal, were the 
officials into whose custody these moral invalids were en- 
trusted. A gentle soul housed in a puny body felt all this, 
but he was untitled, unknown, was considered a dunce, 
at school always at the foot of his class. What could he 
do ? He could do as much as the Bethany woman did, he 
did do all he could, and by doing that he revolutionized the 
prison systems of Europe and wrote the name of John 
Howard in letters of light high upon that obelisk dedicated 
to earth's immortals, and reared in the heart of humanity. 

Paul, studying the prospects of a new gospel, looked out 
upon an inhospitable world. Things looked very unfavor- 
able ; the first teacher had met the fate of a criminal ; 
mighty Kome stretched far and near with her religious in- 
difference, on the one hand, and Jewry with its persecuting 
bigots and jealous sectarians on the other. Paul himself, 
with a ^' thorn in the fiesh", suspected by even the painfal 
minority to which he belonged, what could he do ? He 
could climb to that height whereon stood the Bethany wo- 
man, he could break the alabaster box which contained the 
precious ointment of his life for the blessed cause, and thus 
make Christianity possible. One step still further back. 
How small were the chances for success, how unfavorable 
were the prospects for an humble carpenter's son in the 
backwoods of Glalilee for doing anything to improve the 
morals and purify the religion of the world ! What ridi- 
cule and contempt was in store for him ; what disappoint- 
ment and defeat was inevitable ! But he could do what 
he could. He anticipated his lowly sister, and out of the 



24 TAITIIFULNESS. 

fullness of that lid calculating consecration cametlie parables 
and the beatitudes, the morality of the ^ golden rule' and 
the piety of the Lord's Prayer, the insight by the well 
and the triumph on Calvary. Out of that consecration 
came the dignity of soul that has led the centuries to mis- 
take him for a God, and that divine humility that at the 
same time has led the weak and the ignorant to confidently 
take his hand as that of an elder brother. What potency 
there is in a human soul where all its energies are called into 
action and wholly consecrated, consecrated after the fashion 
of the Bethany woman, — " She hath done what she could." 

But let not my illustrations over-reach my sermon. I 
would enforce it with no exceptional achievements, no un- 
paralleled excellency. What if the approving words of Jesus in 
my text had fallen upon ears too dull to remember them, and 
the inspiring story had not been told in remembrance of her 
throughout the whole world? What if Mother Bicker- 
dyke and her associates of the Sanitary Commission had been 
forgotten, and "Uncle Tom's Cabin" had been a literary 
failure ? Suppose Lloyd Garrison had been silenced, and 
John Howard had failed to lessen the inhumanity visited 
upon a single convict in all Europe? What if Paul had 
been forgotten and the crucifiers of Jesus had succeeded in 
putting down the great movement of spirit which he started; 
would not these records have been as clear within and above 
for all that? Would not God have filled their souls with 
the same peace and blessedness? In God's sight, at least, 
would not the service have been as holy and the triumph as 
great ? I have cited but a few illustrations of a law that 
obtains throughout the universe. No more assured is science 
that no physical impulse ever dies, but goes on in increasing 
waves towards the farthest confines of an infinite universe, 
than are we that every throb of the spirit for the best and 



FAITHFULNESS. 25 

the truest over-rides all obstacles^ disarms all opposition, 
overcomes contempt, and survives all death. 

/'"What is excellent, 
As God lives, is permanent,'' 

^ ^ -H- ^-' « 

*'House and tenant go to ground. 
Lost in God, in God-head found." 

Just as truly as every material picture the light of sun 
has ever fallen upon is forever photographed somewhere up- 
on the tablets of space, so surely is every kindly smile, that 
ever lit the face of any pain-stricken woman, or calmed the 
storm in the passionate heart of man, transformed into a bit 
of everlasting light, that makes more radiant some section 
of the spiritual universe. 

*^ Gone are they, but I have them in my so^l 1" 

God Is not wasteful. He poorly apprehends the Divine 
that regards him as balancing his books according to some 
scheme in which the glory or doom of the mortal is deter- 
mined by some sacrificial ceremonial or theological entry; 
a book-keeping in which kindly deeds, pleasant smiles and. 
cheerful words are not entered. The salvation of the Beth- 
any woman, and the salvation we should most covet, is there- 
suit not of faith, but of faitlifidness ; not the acceptance of 
a saving scheme proffered from without, but loyalty to a 
saving grace springing from within ; not acceptance of belief, 
but the dispensing of kindness. This salvation which comes 
by fidelity finds its exemplification not simply or perhaps 
chiefly in the muster-rolls of our churches and those whom 
our preachers class among the "saved," but among the un- 
counted millions of sincere souls that are content to do their 
daily work faithfully, carry their nearest duty with patience, 



26 FAITHFULNESS. 

and thankfully live on the near .oves of dear hearts, though 
they 

"Leave no memorial but a world made 

A little better by their lives.' ^ 

This Bethany woman becomes a saint in the Church of 
the Holy Endeavor. She is an apostle of that gospe) that 
makes religion glorified morality and morals realized re- 
ligion ; that makes life and not doctrine the test of religious 
confidence and fellowship ; character the only credential of 
piety; honesty the only saviour; justice the "great judg- 
ment-seat" of God, and a loving spirit his atoning grace. 
This Bethany woman is a missionary of the evangel, the 
good news, that helpfulness to one's neighbor is holiness to 
the Lord ; that kindness is the best evidence of a prayerful 
spirit; and that the graces of Heaven are none other than 
the moralities of earth raised to commanding pre-eminence. 

This faith that makes faithful enables us to rest in our 
humblest endeavor. It is not for him who sits at this end 
of yon telegraph line, and with deft and diligent fingers 
transmits the message into its electric veins, to anxiously stop 
and query whether it will ever reach its destination, and to 
wonder who is to receive and transcribe it upon its arrival. 
That is not his business. The management is adequate to 
that work. Other minds and hands will attend to that. It 
is for him faithfully to transmit. So, friends, it is not for 
us to query the efficacy of those small acts ; the savins^ power 
of these lowly graces ; the daily, hourly messages of humble 
faithfulness. It is only for us to transmit : the Infinite will 
receive the dispatches. Like faithful soldiers, it is ours not 
to reason why but to do^ and, if need be, die. 

The lawyer may not, can not purify his profession ; but he 
can be a pure member in it. The merchant can not stop 
the iniquitous practices of trade, but he can be an honest 
merchant or else go out of the business. The mother may 



not be able to keep down the shallow standards that bewitch 
her daughters ; but she can pitch the key of her own life so 
high that the dignity of her soul will rebuke these standards 
and disarm them of their power. The father may not be 
able to keep his sons from temptations, but he can himself 
desist from the filthy habit, the loose language, the indiffer- 
ent life, that his admiring child is more likely to copy from 
him than from any one else. Our lives can not escape dis- 
appointments and weaknesses ; but if we could only have 
faith in the efficacy of doing all we can, until faith ripens in- 
to faithfulness, there would flow into our lives a sweetness, a 
wholesomeness, a strength and a peace that will ultin^tely 
overflow into the world and into eternity. Studying thus 
we shall find in this brief story the secret of a salvation that 
most of the creeds miss. 

"What shall I do to be forever known ? ' 

"Thy duty ever." 
**This did full many who yet slept unknown." 
''Oh, never, never ! 
Thinkest thou perchance that they remain unknown 

Whom thou know'st not? 
By angel trumps in Heaven their praise is blown — 
Divine their lot." 

*<What shaH I do to gain eternal life?" 

"Discharge aright 
The simple dues with which each day is rife, 

Yea, with thy might. 
Ere perfect scheme of action thou desire, 

Will life be fled, • 
While he, who ever acts as conscience cries, 

Shall live, though dead." 

The second reason why we do not do all we can is that we 
are ashamed to try, for fear people will laugh at us. Next to 
a lack of faith in the efficacy of what we can do, comes the 
blighting dread of exposing our weakness and our littleness 



28 FAITHFULNESS. 

to others. Sad as it may be, it is yet true that many 
worthy souls shrink not only from their simplest, plainest 
duties, but their highest, noblest opportunities from the 
mere dread of being laughed at. So they indolently hide 
themselves behind the screen of what they "would like" to 
do and be rather than royally reveal what they can do and 
what they are. How many people to-day go to churches 
they do not believe in and stand aloof from causes their in- 
tellect approves, because of the ridicule and the social os- 
tracism such loyalty would bring to them ! I doubt not the 
hands of a dozen women in Bethany ached that morning to 
do the very thing this woman did do. But they did not 
dare ; the disciples, or somebody else, would laugh at them ; 
and they were right about it. They certainly would, and 
they did. 

The woman knows that this or that fashion is ridiculous ; 
that custom meaningless; or worse, criminal ; but others do it. 
For her to refrain would be to make herself peculiar. She's 
afraid of being laughed at. The young man knows that the cigar 
is a filthy thing ; that the intoxicating glass is a dangerous 
enemy, yet to set his face against them like flint would be 
to "make himself odd." He does not dare to do all he can 
to dispel these curses by refusing them for himself, for fear 
of being laughed at. I dare not push these inquiries into 
the more internal things of life, lest I might be unjust. I 
fear that the spiritual, intellectual and social servility that 
might be discovered is something appalling. This moral 
cowardice is a practical infidelity more alarming than all the 
honest atheism and avowed skepticism of this or any other age. 
Moral courage is the great want of our times, and all times. 
Not courage to do the great things, so-called, but to do the 
greater things which we call "little." There is always hero- 
ism enough to snatch women and children from burning build- 
ings, or to make a bayonet charge on the battle-field, whether 



FAITHFULNESS. 29 

spiritual or material, but always too little courage to befriend 
the forsaken ; to do picket duty for advanced ideas, to stand as 
lonely sentinels in the vanguard of progress. More beroic is 
the smile that robs the pain of its groan than is the defiant 
hurrah of a charging column. More daring is the breaking 
of a single flask of ointment by a shrinking, trembling, de- 
spised soul in behalf of what seems to be a losing cause, 
than volumes of wordy rhetoric from arrogant believers. It 
was not the presumptuous Pharisee who emptied his fat 
purse into the treasury box, but the poor widow who dared 
to come after him, and dropped in her two mites, which made 
a farthing, that stirred the heart of Jesus, for she gave out 
of a quivering life. 

*^Two mites, two drops, but all her house and land, 
Fell from an earnest heart but trembling hand, 
The others' wanton wealth foamed high and brave, 
The others cast away, she only gave." 

It was not the Chicago Board of Trade that out of grow- 
ing fortunes equipped a battery, recruited a regiment^ and 
filled the coffers of the Sanitary Commission, and then drove 
home to sleep on sumptuous couches and eat from groaning 
tables, that did the brave thing or gave grandly to the war, 
but the mother who kissed her only son on the door-step 
and through her tears said, "Go, my child, your country needs 
you," and then turned around to find all the light gone out 
of her humble home. It is not the man who gives fifty 
thousand dollars to found an institution, while he has several 
hundred thousand more to misuse in selfish ways, that is gen- 
erous ; but he who gives the half of yesterday's toil, the half 
of his night's sleep, foregoes an expected pleasure, or does 
the still harder thing, stands up to be laughed at, who sides . 
with truth — 

*'Ere her cause bring fame and profit, and 'tis prosperous to 
be just," — 



30 FAITHFULNESS. 

that is true to tlie standard of the Bethany woman. 
Giving is not the throwing away of that which we never 
miss, but it is the consecrating to noble uses that which is 
very dear to us, that which has cost us much ; it is the 
bravely daring to be faithful over the few things given us. 
Doing this is what makes transcendent the courage of the 
Bethany woman. Probably she was one of the three women 
who, a few days after, stood by the cross, endured the wrong 
they could not cure, — 

*' Undaunted by the threatening death, 
Or harder circumstance of living doom." 

From the saddened radiance upon their faces streams a 
mellow light which reveals the rottenness of the timbers 
in that well-painted bridge of expediency, popularity and 
prosperity over which our lives would fain pass. Now, 
as then, would-be disciples withdraw from the conflict 
of truth with wrong ; absent themselves from the service of 
the ideas and the rights they believe in, instead of standing 
on the Golgotha grounds where rages the battle of life 
against forms, freedom against slavery, honesty against pre- 
tense, candor against equivocation, intelligent reason against 
conventional creed. These women bore testimony to the 
truth in the grandest way it is possible for human souls to 
testify, by standing with it when there is no crowd to lower 
the standard ; by voting at a place where the popular stand- 
ards give way to the divine; for surely when he sweeps the 
chaff 

'•'From the Lord's threshing floor, 
We see that more than half 
The victory is attained, when one or two, 
Through the fool's laughter and the traitor's scorn, 
Beside thy sepulcher can abide the more 
Crucified truth when thou shalt rise anew." 

This Bethany loyalty, friends, is the simple requirement 



FAITHFULNESS. 31 

of religion. Not one cent, rot one moment, not one loving 
impulse, not one thought, not one syllable of a creed, more 
than comes within the range of your possibilities is expected, 
but all of this is expected ; nothing less will do. God asks 
for no more and man has no right to expect it, but all of 
this he does expect and no man can evade it. Bring your 
flasks of precious ointment, break them, anoint with them 
that which is worthy, and there will escape therefrom a 
fragrance as pervasive, as lasting as that which filled the air 
of Bethany nineteen hundred years ago, for it will be the 
same flask of consecration broken by the same hand of 
courage, the same ointment of good will, the same spikenard 
of love, very precious. Let duty be its own reward; love, its 
own justification, '^ She hath done what she could." This 
is the fullness of the Christian excellence; it is the ultimate 
standard of religion, 



^' I HAD A FRIEND." 



Our Bible is a book of lives. It is a book of men pray- 
ing rather than a book of prayer, of men believing rather 
than a book of beliefs, of men sinning and repenting and 
righting themselves rather than a book of ethics. It is a 
book, too, of men loving : it is full of faces turned towards 
faces. As in the procession-pictures frescoed on rich old 
walls, the well-known men and women come trooping through 
its pages in twos and threes, or in little bands of which we 
recognize the central figure and take the others to be those 
unknown friends immortalized by just one mention in this 
book. Adam always strays with Eve along the foot-paths 
of our fancy. Abram walks with Sarah, Rebecca at the 
well suggests the Isaac waiting somewhere, and Rachel's 
presence pledges Jacob's not far off. Two brothers and a 
sister together lead Israel out from Egypt. Here come 
Ruth and Naomi, and there go David and Jonathan. Job 
sits in his ashes forlorn enough, but not for want of com- 
forters, — we can hardly see Job for his friends. One whole 
book in the Old Testament is a love-song about an eastern 
king and one of his dusky brides; although, to keep the 
Bible biblical, our modern chapter-headings call the Song 
of Solomon a prophecy of the love of the Christian Church 
for Christ. Some persons have wished the book away, but 
a wise man said the Bible would have lacked, had it not held 
somewhere in its pages a human love-song. True, the 
Prophets seem to wander solitary, — prophets usually do ; 
yet, though we seldom see their ancient audience, they 
doubtless had one. Minstrels and preachers always presup- 
pose the faces of a congregation, 



"I HAD A friend/' 33 

But as we step from Old Testament to New, again we 
hear the buzz of little companies. We follow Jesus in 
and out of homes ; children cluster about his feet ; women 
love him ; a dozen men leave net and plough to bind to his 
their fortunes, and others go forth by twos, not ones, to 
imitate him. ^^ Friend of publicans and sinners" was his 
title with those who loved him not. Across the centuries 
we like and trust him all the more because he was a man 
of many friends. No spot in all the Bible is quite so over- 
coming as that garden-scene where the brave, lonely sufferer 
comes back, through the darkness under the olive-trees, to 
his three chosen hearts, within a stone's throw of his heart- 
break, — to find them fast asleep ! Once before, in that uplift- 
ed hour from which far off he descried Gethsemane, — we call 
it the " Transfiguration," — we read of those same three friends 
asleep. The human loneliness of that soul in the garden as 
he paused by Peter's side, — " You ! could you not watch 
with me one hour ?" — and turned back into the darkness, 
and into God ! Then came the kiss with which another of his 
twelve betrayed him. No passage in the Gospels makes 
him so real a man to us as this ; no words so appeal to us to 
stand by and be his friends. 

Jesus gone, we see the other hero of the New Testament 
starting off on missionary journeys, — but Barnabas or Mark 
or Silas or Timothy is with him. The glowing postscripts 
of his letters tell how many hearts Paul loved and how 
much he loved them and how many hearts loved him. 
What a comrade he must have been, — the man who dicta- 
ted the thirteenth of Corinthians ! What a hand-grasp in 
his favorite phrases — "/eZ?ow;-laborers," "/e^^ottJ-soldiers,'* 
"/e^/or^'-prisoners I" We wonder who the men and women 
were he names, — ''Luke the well-beloved physician," and 
" Zenas the lawyer," and " Tryphena, and Tryphosa," and 
"Stachys my beloved." Just hear him send his love to 



34 "I HAD A FRIEND.'* 

some of these friends : it is the end of what in solemn 
phrase we call the Epistle to the Romans, — what Paul would 
perhaps have called ''the letter I sent the dear souls in that 
little church in Rome" : — 

'' I commend unto you Phebe, our sister, that ye assist- 
her in whatsoever business she hath need of you" (help that 
woman !) for she hath been a succourer of many, and of 
myself, .too. Greet Priscilla and Aquila, my helpers in 
Christ Jesus, who have for my life laid down their own 
necks. Greet Mary who bestowed much labor on us. Sa- 
lute Andronicus and Junia, my kinsmen and my fellow 
prisoners. Greet Amplias, my beloved in the Lord. Sa- • 
lute Urbane, our helper in Christ, and Stachys my beloved, 
t^alute Tryphena and Tryphosa, who labor in the Lord, and 
the beloved Persis, and Rufus chosen in the Lord, and his 
mother — and niiney And so on. 

" His mother — his and mine:" no doubt Paul had a dozen 
dear old mothers in those sea-board cities where he came 
and went. It brings him very near to us to read such words. 
Why, if one had lived then and had been '' radical" Jews 
like him, and like him had dared and joyed to speak our faith, 
and for it had been brave enough to stand by his side in 
labors and in prisons, our names might have slipped into 
those letters, and loe have been among the dozen or twenty 
picked out from all the Marys and Lukes and Pauls of the 
Roman Empire to be enshrined in a Rible postscript and 
guessed about eighteen hundred years afterwards, — because 
Paul had once sent his love to us in a letter ! I would far 
rather spare some of the words in which he tells us his 
thought of the Christ and the Church than those names 
that huddle at his letter-ends. They make the Epistles real 
letters, such as we mailed yesterday. They bring Paul 
down out of his Rible niche, and forward out of the mag- 
nificent distance of a Bible character, and make him just 



^^I HAD A FRIEND." 35' 

" PauV alive and lovable ; a man to whom our hearts warm 
still, because his own heart was so warm that men fell on his 
neck and kissed him when he told them they should see his 
face no more. 

So much for the friendships of the Bible. Now for our 
own as sacred. 

It is happiness to have some one ^' glad you are alive." 
No wonder that poor girls take their lives when they come 
to feel that not one face lights up because they are in the 
world, or would be shadowed if they left it. We who have 
the friends know how much of all earth's worth to us lies 
in certain eyes and faces, certain voices, certain hands. 
Fifty persons, or perhaps but five, make the wide world 
populous for us, and living in it beautiful. The spring-times 
and the sun-sets, and all things grand and sweet besides, are at 
their grandest and their sweetest when serving as locality 
and circumstance to love. The hours of our day are really 
timed by sounds of coming feet : if you" doubt it, wait till 
the feet have ceased to sound along the street and up the 
stair. Our week's real Sabbath is the day which brings the 
weekly letter. The year's real June and Christmas come 
at the rare meeting- times ; and the true ^' Year of the Lord" 
was the time when certain twos first met. Let the few hands 
vanish, the few voices grow still, and the emptied planet seems 
a whirling grave-yard ; for it no longer holds the few who 
wanted us and whom we wanted. "Who wanted us," — 
that is the word to start with : the deepest of all human 
longings is simply to he wanted. 

So Mother Nature has seen to it for the most of us 
that, at least upon arrival here, we shall be wanted. She 
sends the wee ones into the world so wondrously attractive 
that we get more worship then than ever afterwards, when 
it might do us harm. We are prayed for before we come,. 



36 "I HAD A FRIEND. " 

we are thanked for with the family's thanksgiving at our 
advent, a mother's sense of motherhood and a father's sense 
of fatherhood have been begotten to prepare self-sacrifices 
for us : all this by jvay of welcome. In one word, we are 
" wanted ^' in the world when we reach it. '' No entrance here 
except on business ", true ; but the babies have the business, — 
who so much ? Very pitiful are the young lives for whom 
these pre-arrangements of love fail. 

But soon our helplessness is past, and what ought to be 
the period of our helpfulness has come ; and then is there 
anything that we can do to make that title, "Wanted", 
sure ? Is there any recipe for winning friends ? In old 
Rome young men and maidens used to drink love-potions 
and wear charms to eke out their winsomeness : in this 
modern time is there any potion, any charm, for friend-mak- 
ing ? The question is worth asking, for it is no low ambi- 
tion to wish to be desired in the world, no low endeavor to 
deliberately try to be love-worthy. Wise father he — '' the 
Lord's chore-boy" one called him, — the sunny-faced old 
Abolitionist, who brought his children up to know that 
"the one thing worth living for is to love and to be loved." 
But as to recipes for loveableness, the young soul in its 
romance laughs to scorn so kitchen-like a question. And right 
to laugh the young soul is ; for much in the business pas- 
seth recipe. We speak of " choosing " friends, of "mak- 
ing" friends, of " keeping" or of "giving up" friends; andif 
.such terms were wholly true, the old advice were good, — In 
friend-making first consult the gods ! Jesus, it is said, 
prayed all the night before he chose his twelve. But the 
words are not all true ; friendship is at most but half- 
"made," — the other half is born. What we can chiefly 
" choose" and " make " is, not the friend, but opportunity 
for contact. When the contact happens^ something higher 
than our will chooses for us. Fore-ordination then comes 



^^I HAD A FRIEND.'' 37 

in. *' Matches are made in heaven," and before the 
foundation of the world our friendships are arranged. 
"Thine they were and thou gavest them me," we feel of 
those whom we love best — ^borrowing words which, it is said 
again, Jesus used of his disciple-friends. Nothing super- 
natural in this ; but it is so supremely natural, the secret of 
it roots so deep in the heart of Nature, that it passeth un- 
derstanding. We can not cross the laws of attraction and 
repulsion ; can only attract and be . attracted, repel and be 
repelled, according to those laws. There is in Nature a 
great deal of that phenomenon called " love-at-sight. " 
Whoever wrote it truly wrote, — 

*' Thou shall know him, when he «omes 
Not by any din of drums, 
Nor the vantage of his airs ; 
Neither by his crown, 
Nor his gown, 
Nor by anything he wears . 
He shall only well-known be 
By the holy harmony 
That his coming makes in thee!/' 

And, on the other hand, there is in Nature that opposite 
experience of which Dr. Fell is the typical victim : — 

'* I do not love thee, Dr. Fell : 
The reason why I can not tell, 
But this alone I know full well — 
I do not love thee, Dr. Fell." 

How often we have seen the poor doctor ! How often 
we have heen the poor doctor! And though we smile, 
we ache for him. It is tragedy — this one-sidedness of 
friendship, these unequal gravitations of love. But what 
makes gravitation? The men of science can not tell 
us. "Fascination" is soul -gravitation. "Personal magnetism" 
we sometimes call it, using another word to hide our ignor- 
ance, and meaning the sum of all the mysterious ccn tripe- 



3-8 ''I HAD A FRIEND." 

tal forces that lodge in us and all radiations of health 
and beauty that go out from us. It lies in the glancing of 
the eyCj in the flitting of the smile, in the toning of the voice, 
in the poise of the figure, in the grace of the motion. Near- 
ly all have more or less of it ; but some how enviably the 
more, and others how lamentably the less! Some persons 
make more friends as they come into the room, or as they 
walk down the street, or as they smile their greeting, than 
others of us can hope to make with long and solid service. 

But grant all this, — still our young lover is but half- 
right in laughing at a recipe for love. We know no cause 
of gravitation, but we can study its laws and apply it in a 
thousand forms of civilizing work : and whatever can be 
studied in its laws is subject for a science, wherever laws can 
be applied is subject for an art. So is it with soul-gravita- 
tion. There is then both a science and an art of Friendship. 
Besides that mystic element in it so hard to be accounted 
for, so hard to be acquired, there is a moral element in it 
which is an oj)en secret, and this can be acquired. Indeed, 
so fai' as it is true that " beauty is the flowering of virtue," 
that mystic element is moral, too. Hidden in the "virtue" 
of the ancestors may he the source of all the alien grace, 
sometimes so visibly divorced from virtue in the children ; 
and, given time enough — say, generations, centuries — per- 
haps there is no limit to the outward fascination which 
may be earned and won. Be that as it may, so sure and 
large is this moral element in love that by it one can go far 
to " make" friends, after all If we choose to be, we can 
be "wanted" in this world. In a deep and worthy sense 
old Ovid, he who wrote the poem on the "Art of Loving," 
might be imitated. And when you write your poem on 
that subject, you will without fail put into it one hint. — that 
friendships based on the mystic surface-fascinations are the 
kind so apt to end in tragedies of waning and of broken love ; 



"I HAD A FRIEND." 39 

whereas the attractiveness which can be acquired makes 
basis for the friendships apt to solidly endure. 

We must stop right here a moment ; for different persons 
mean such different things by "Friendship." The one who 
uses the sacred word most easily is the one least likely to 
know much about the sacred thing. Some people know 
every one they speak of so very well indeed! " Oh yes, an 
intimate friend of mine," they say, when you ask if they 
have ever met A or B. They have met him. One may 
well hesitate to answer Yes even to the common question, 
" Do you know such or such a person ? " Know him? I have 
seen him six times, I travelled with him half a day, once I 
had a long argument with him, he told me stories of his 
childhood and we discovered that four generations back we 
would have been first cousins, — but do I know him? No. 
I have an opinion whether I like him or not, whether 
he has common sense or not, perhaps whether I would trust 
him or not; but I do not know that man. Much more 
is it in place to be modest about claiming him as friend." 

Even speaking carefully, every one has at least two mean- 
ings for our sacred word. Each of us is ringed about by 
two circles, both commonly called "friends." The outer 
circle is the circle of our Likers, the inner is the circle of 
our Lovers. The main secret of having Likers lies in jus- 
tice carried to the point of kindliness and courtesy. Justice 
carried to the point of kindliness and courtesy commands the 
good word when people talk of us behind our back ; it com- 
mands the hearty greeting when we ring the bell ; it com- 
mands the true " I'm glad to see you" in the eyes as well 
as voice ; it commands the excuse in our behalf when some 
one dwells upon our faults with over-emphasis, and defense 
when people misinterpret and misrepresent us. Now jus- 
tice carried to the point of courtesy and kindliness is acquir- 



40 "I HAD A FRIEND." 

able. The recipe for making Likers calls for no rare mate- 
rial : all I need lies right before me and around me in the 
opportunities of doing truthful, just, kind things by those I 
deal with. The recipe calls for no rare element, and the 
mixing and the making take no one day in the week. 
There is baking day, sweeping day, washing day, but no 
friend-making day. It is Monday's, Tuesday's, Wednes- 
day's work, and lasts through Saturday and Sunday and the 
twenty-ninth of February. As one does his business he 
makes his Liker. There is no place nor time nor way of 
making him save as we go the rounds of common living; 
for by the common deeds of the common life we all test 
likings. What is more, the recipe never wholly fails. Try 
it faithfully and it is sure to bring us Likers. It is worth 
repeating to ourselves and emphasizing, — If we really wish 
to be, we can be "wanted" in the world ; and the ambition 
to be wanted here is a worthy one; and the effort to be want- 
ed nurtures in us that quick couitesy and instinctive kind- 
liness that flower out from an unfailing justice. 

But now to turn from our Likers to our Lovers. The 
conditions here are harder, and therefore the culture gained 
in meeting the conditions is proportionately higher. Come 
with me to that inner circle that only holds the lives knit 
up with ours by a thousand crossing ties, and where we say 
with a yearning and exultation so different from anything 
felt in outer meanings of the word, " J/^ friends !^^ And 
some of us are thinking of an inmost center where we never 
use the plural ; are thinking that the truest friendship casts 
out all but two together and, for the time at least, crowns him 
or her alone the friend. We feel as if we had achieved our 
life's success in that one winning, and say with Robert 
Brownins:, — 



^I HAD A FRIEND." 41 , 



*< I am named and known by that hour's feat, 
There took my station and degree : 
So grew my own small life complete 
As Nature obtained her best of me, — 
One born to love you ! ' ' 

Be it SO : but even then it is true to say tliat the secret is 
largely a moral secret. Nay, more true of such love than 
of any other to say that it is goodness which attracts. 
Luckily for some of us, one may love a poor kind of fellow; 
but they love us not in virtue of our poorness, — it is in 
spite of it. They love us for some real or fancied excellence, 
some evidence of truthfulness and rightfulness they think 
that they discern in us. 

And with that word we reach a high thought worth a 
climb, this namely, that to have a true friend one must love 
Truth and Right better than he loves that friend. To win 
a true friend, you and I must love Truth and Right better 
than that friend, however dear. This involves another of 
love's tragedies, for, by this rule, wherever there is noble 
friendship there is always possibility of its waning ; although 
at the time, to believe that waning possible is impossible. 
But the relation to be vital must be fresh each day. If 
there were not a new demand made by me on my friend and 
made upon me by my friend each time we met, a new de- 
mand to be then and there worth loving, half the charm 
would be gone. It is the heart mine, yet mine only by fresh 
necessity of winning it by nobleness — it is my heart his, yet 
his by an ever fresh necessity of giving it to him for 
his worth's sake, — that makes the dearness so ineffable. 
In order then to be "friends" in this high sense, we 
must be ever ready to be renounced if we persist in a de- 
liberate No before a duty, must be ever ready to renounce 
if he persists in such a No. It is not that the two must 
take the same idea of duty, or that, when one fails to do 



42 ^^I HAD A FRIEND." 

his duty, lie falls from all regard ; but that, when he so fails, 
he falls as if by fate out of that chosen place of which we 
have been speaking, The man is there, and, as we use the 
words, agoodman still; as we use words, is still " our friend;" 
perhaps he even falls into a tenderer place than ever ; but 
it is the tenderness of pity now, no more a tenderness of 
reverence. The short and simple fact is, our man, our wo- 
man, has vanished : we have lost that ideal made real which 
we had been calling ''friend." We cannot, if we would, 
feel to him as we did before. No heart-labor can put him 
where he was before. For Truth and Right had placed 
him there, not we, — they only can replace him. Those 
moral nature-forces behind good-will, that generate attrac- 
tion, must be again invoked; and a man can only make the 
old attraction his again by reclaiming the old honor to his 
soul. 

*' We needs must love the highest when we see it, 
Not Launcelot, nor another; '^ — 

though Launcelot be the name of husband or of brother ! 
Does it seem strange to say it ? — here in this possibility of 
tragedy lies the ennobling power of love. From the sure- 
ness of losing it if undeserved, comes compulsion to deserve 
it. We feel that our friendship with John or with 
Ellen is our highest title of honor, our patent of nobility, 
and sit ever in a sense of glad amaze that we can 
call such superiority, ''My friend." There can be no con- 
sciously hidden weakness in us and we be safe in their affec- 
tion. Perfect love casteth out fear, but only by having 
revealed everything that maketh fear. To discover, after a 
year's close friendship, a concealed meanness in me, would, as 
meanness, degrade me in your eyes, but as concealed from 
you it would be treachery. So we dare not come to the point 
when the one we love shall think of us, "He is a lower 



"I HAD A FRIEND." 43 

kind of man," or " She is a lower kind of woman, than I 
imagined." If liked as much after that discovery as before, 
for such loyalty to us rather than to Right our love for them 
would actually grow less. The surprises of friendship — 
and how exquisite they are ! — ought only to be of unsus- 
pected excellences. But what woe, when one whom we 
have wholly trusted reels ! If this embodiment of honor, 
truth and kindness reels and falls before our eyes, we have 
lost more than friend : for that moment we have lost our 
vision of Grod I Groodness seems emptiness, and the very 
planet jars ! We can understand the story told of Pascal, 
that once, when Arnauld seemed to prefer peace to truths 
the shock to Pascal was so great that he fainted away. 

Hence there must needs be undimmed sincerity, and hu- 
mility even to confession, in every exalting love. Almost 
we have to say — 

* * Have I a lover 

Who is noble and free, 
I would he were nobler 
Than to love me/'* 

And we know so well the truth of Emerson's other word, 
that '' in the last analysis love is only the reflection of a 
man's own worthiness from other men" — know that so well 
that, in a half-fear lest we should gain under false pre- 
tenses the love we crave, we are impelled to exaggerate our 
poorness. " Love, me, love my dog," says the proverb: 
" Love me, love the dog in me !" says friendship. Love 
me as I am, poor as I am, know me and yet love me ! 

Among all ennobling forces, therefore, hardly any other 
can be named so strong as an inmost Friendship. As the 
special culture which the winning of our Likers gives is that 
of quick, wide kindliness, the special culture which the 
winning of our Lovers gives is that of purity, sincerity, 
humility, selflessness, and the high standard for all honor- 



44 "I HAD A FRIEND." 

able qualities. That says it, — the high standard for all hon- 
orable qualities : to win and hold a friend we are compelled 
to keep ourselves at his ideal point, and in turn our love 
makes on him the same appeal. Each insists on his right 
in the other to an ideal. All around the circle of our best 
beloved it is this idealizing that gives to love its beauty and 
its pain and its mighty leverage on character. Its beauty, 
because that idealizing is the secret of love's glow. Its pain, 
because that idealizing makes the constant peril of love's 
vanishing. Its leverage to uplift character, because this 
same idealizing is a constant challenge between every two, 
compelling each to be his best. '• What is the secret of your 
life?" asked Mrs. Browning of Charles Kingsley; "tell 
me, that I may make mine beautiful too." He replied, 
"/ had a friend ^ The reverence this implies borders 
closely upon worship and the ennoblement that comes of 
that. What the dying Bunsen said as he looked up in the 
eyes of his wife bending over him, " In thy face have I 
seen the Eternal!" is the thought of many a heart 
before its best beloved. That beloved is our " beautiful 
enemy," in Emerson's phrase; our " dear dread," as some 
older writer called him; our outside conscience, a kind of 
Jesus-presence before which we fear to do a wrong. What 
rare power to awake power in her friends and to set them 
as it were in an invisible church, this sentence attests in Mar- 
garet Fuller: "I have no doubt that she saw expressions, 
heard tones, and received thoughts from her companions, 
which no one else ever saw or heard from the same persons."- 
Somewherein her "Middlemarch" Greorge Eliot puts it well : 
" There are natures in which, if they love us, we are con- 
scious of having a sort of baptism and consecration; they 
bind us over to rectitude and purity by their pure belief 
about us ; and our sins become the worst kind of sacrilege, 
which tears down the invisible altar of trust." 



"I HAD A FRIEND," 4:5 

With Friendship meaning so much, capable of doing so 
much, do we lower or rather dignify the relation of father 
and mother to the child, of sister to brother, of husband to 
wife, when we say, " Those two are each other's best 
friend "? In between the common likings of society and 
the heart's-one-choice comes that whole choir of family 
affections. The father keeps the boy his son by making 
him, when young, his friend. As the years run by, the 
sister keeps the brother, the brother keeps the sister, in 
love, less by the blood-tie than by the words and works and 
trusts of friendship, And in the marriage itself the early 
love must ripen into close, abiding, inmost friendship. The 
happiest marriages take place gradually and go on deepen- 
ing all through the life together. Hardly are they begun 
when the presents and congratulations come, and the min- 
ister says " Until death do you two part." 

And for the many who can never love the one, or who, 
loving, are not loved as the one; who 

** May not make this world a Paradise 
By walking it together >and in hand, 
With eyes that, meeting, find a double strength," — 

for them the great solace, the great elevation, is to love 
loveableness — love it in all — be it to all. This is really the 
end of all the single and personal affections, — this is the 
end even of wedded love. You may have skipped that 
stage, you may have lost that usual path, but still may find 
the hill top for which that path is. 

A friend has many functions. He comes as the Brighten - 
or into our life to double joys and halve our griefs. He 
comes as the Counsellor to give wisdom to our plans. He 
comes as the Strengthener to multiply our opportunities and 
be hands and feet for us in our absence. But, above all 
use like this, he comes as our Rebuker to explain our fail- 



46 ^'I HAD A FRIEND." 

Tires and sliame us from our lowness ; as our Purifier, our 
Uplifter, our Ideal, whose life to us is a constant challenge 
in our heart, ^' Friend, come up higher, — higher along with 
me ; that you and I may be those true lovers who are nearest 
to Grod when nearest to each other !" 

But when such a friend as this — it may be the one called 
Father, Husband, Brother, or Mother, Sister, Wife, or 
simply. Friend — when such a friend as this does, as we say, 
go nearer to Grod, becoming invisible to us, it is wonderful 
to feel Death growing beautiful, the unseen world becoming 
real, and Q-od's goodness seeming good as never before. It is 
that vanished one who changes all things so for us , hy adding 
Ms goodness to the unseen side of things. Noble friends — 
only the noble probably — have power to leave us this be- 
quest ; power to bequeathe us a sense of God more real and 
good, a sense of Deathlessness more sure. Therefore we 
can never know the whole of a friend's blessing until he has 
died. We speak of circles ''broken" by death, but a circle 
is really incomplete until some of the friends sit out of sight. 



TENDERNESS. 

" The bruised reed shall he not break." — Isaiah XLII : 3. 

Some years ago I clipped the following from a Chicago 
daily paper: 

A Cincinnati paper says : '' In a pottery factory here there 
is a workman who had one small invalid child at home. He 
wrought at his trade with exemplary fidelity, being always in 
the shop with the opening of the day. He managed, however, 
to bear each evening to the bedside of his *'wee lad," as he 
called him, a flower, a bit of ribbon, or a fragment of crimson 
glass — indeed, anything that would lie out on tba white.counter- 
pane and give color to the room. He was a quiet, unsenti- 
mental man, but never went home at night without something 
that would make the wan face light up with joy at his return. 
He never said to a living soul that he loved that boy so much. 
Still he went on patiently loving him, and by and by he moved 
that whole shop into positively real but unconscious fellowship 
with him. The workmen made curious little jars and cui)3 up- 
on their wheels, and painted diminutive pictures down their 
sides before they stuck them in the corners of the kiln at burn- 
ing time. One brought some fruit in the bulge of his apron, 
and another engravings in a rude scrap-book. Not one of them 
whispered a word, for this solemn thing was not to be talked 
about. They put them in the old man's hat, where he found 
them ; he understood all about it, and, believe it or not, cynics, 
as you will, but it is a fact that the entire pottery full of men, of 
rather coarse fiber by nature, grew quiet as the months drifted, 
becoming gentle and kind, and some dropped swearing as the 
weary look on the patient fellow-worker' s face told them beyond 
mistake that the inevitable shadov/ was drawing nearer. Every 
day now some one did a piece of work for him and put it on the 
sanded plank to dry, so that he could come later and go earlier. ' 
So, when the bell tolled and the little cofiin came out of the lonely 
door, right around the corner, out of sight, there stood a hundred 
stalwart workingmen from the pottery with their clean clothes on, 



48 TENDERNESS. 



most of whom gave a half day's time for the privilege of taking 
part in the simple procession and following to the grave that 
small burden of a child which probably not one had evor seen. " 

I sent the clipping to my friend and fellow-laborer in 
Cincinnati, saying that I had great appetite for such things, 
and that I was always ready to believe in their possibility, 
but I did not care to center my interests upon fictitious 
incidents while there were so many real things upon which 
to place them. I asked him if there was any way by which 
he could verify the essential truthfulness of the story. In 
due time I received this reply : — 

Dear Jones : — You sent me the enclosed slip a month ago 
asking me to trace its authority, but it was not until yesterday that 
I found any convenient way of inquiring about it. Then by 
chance I met a reporter named Thompson, who said he wrote it, 
and that it may be depended upon. 

Yours truly, 

Geo. a. Thayer. 

With this assurance I venture to use it as a help in this 
study of Tenderness. 

Note first the strength that lies behind this story, the 
power of that feeling that avoided the debilitating compli- 
ment, suppressed the harrowing word, but accomplished the 
kindly deed. There is that which parses for tenderness that 
might better be called ^' softness. " The tremor of nerve and 
fluttering of heart ; the trembling in the presence of suffer- 
ing and turning pale at the sight of pain is very common, 
quite real, perhaps commendable ; but lacking strength it 
falls short of the grace of tenderness ; it is wanting in mor- 
al quality. There is that which sometimes passes for ten- 
derness that is more physical than spiritual, more selfish 
than disinterested. It springs from untrained nerves, it 
indicates an undisciplined soul, one untried by severity, un- 
tempered by sorrow. Tears in the presence of suffering do 



TENDERNESS. 49 

not necessarily reflect that tenderness described in my text 
and context, that to which Jesus aspired. 

**He shall not cry aloud, nor lift up his voice, 
Nor cause it to be heard in the street. 
The bruised reed shall he not break, 
And the glimmering flax shall he not quench ; 
He shall send forth law according to truth. 
He shall not fail nor become weary, 
Until he shall have established justice in the earth, 
And distant nations shall wait for his law." 

. To shrink from another's suffering because it makes us 
suffer too is only a refined kind of selfishness. One may 
" not have heart enough to kill a chicken," as we say, and 
still be very cruel if this inability springs from weakness 
rather than tenderness. True tenderness is that which can 
destroy limb in order to save life ; when necessary, it can in- 
crease the torture to reduce danger. The truly tender soul 
will gladly endure itself the agony it would not inflict upon 
another. 

"I could not bear to see him suffer, and so I came 
away. " 

"I would hke to help him, but I cannot stand the sight of 
so much wretchedness! " 

*^Some people seem to be able to wash dirty children, to 
teach ignorant ones, to enjoy their attempt to enlighten the 
stupid, to refine the coarse, to ennoble the wicked, — but I 
cannot do these things ; they work on my feelings so. They 
make me so miserable." 

These are familiar sayings and they reveal miserable 
weaknesses. Such confessions ought never to be made except 
in humility. Such lives need to be lifted out of cowardice 
into courage, regenerated out of helplessness into helpfulness. 
When tenderness becomes a virtue, like all virtues it be- 
comes heroic. When we seek an example of highest sensi- 



50 TENDERNESS. 

bility and truest tenderness, we do not take her whose eyes 
are red with weeping over a dead canary bird, or her who 
^^went to bed downright sick," as I once heard a woman 
confess, because '' Pont," the impudent little poodle, had his 
foot pinched by the slamming of the carriage door; but we go 
to the battle-field to find the woman who carries her water 
can and bandages through clotted gore with unblanched 
cheek. We go to the hospital and find the true physician, 
who is also the kind physician, who dares not endanger the 
clearness of his vision with a tear. Indeed, let those who 
would excuse themselves from stern and disagreeable duties 
on account of the tenderness of their hearts or the sensibility of 
their nerves remember that in life as in literature, the pro- 
fession most accustomed to suffering has furnished the most 
illustrious examples of the tenderness that will not ^' break 
a bruised reed " except " thereby the law of life be establish- 
ed upon the earth. " Indeed, the tenderest soul in history 
finds one of his most suggestive titles when he is called the 
^'Grood Physician." One of the tenderest little stories in Eng- 
lish literature is the familiar one of " Rab and His Friends " 
written by John Brown, the good physician of Edinburgh. 
This tells how James Noble, the carrier, brought one day 
into the hospital yard on his cart a woman with 
*' A most unforgetable face, pale, lonely, serious, delicate, sweet: 
— eyes such as one sees only once or twice in a lifetime, full of 
suffering, full also of the overcoming of it : her mouth firm, 
patient and contented, which few mouths ever are. I never saw 
a more beautiful countenance, or one more subdued to settled 
quiet.'' 

*' Maister John, this is the mistress. She has got a trouble in 
her breest, Doctor — some kind of an incoming we are thinking. 
Will you ta'k a look at it? Ailie, this is Maister John, the 
young Doctor, Kab's frien', ye ken. We often speak aboot you, 
Doctor. " 

''And Solomon, in all his glory, could not have handed down 
the Queen of Sheba, at his palace gate, more tenderly than did 



TENDERNESS. 51 



James, the Howgate carrier, lift down Ailie liis wife. ^ ^ ^ 
Twas a sad case. Next day on the bulletin board was the notice 
to the young students, — 



** Up ran the youths, eager to secure good places ; in they 
crowded, full of interest and talk. Don't think them heartless. 
They are neither better nor worse than you or I ; they get over 
their professional horror and into their proper work, — and in 
them pity-as an emotion, ending in itself or at best in tears and a 
long-drawn breath, lessens, while pity as a motive is quickened, 
and gains power and purpose. It is well for poor human nature 
that it is so.' 

From the crowded clinics of the Edinburgh hospital as 
thus described by the good physician, to the dingy walls of 
the Cincinnati pottery is a great distance in thought as well 
as in space, but human nature has greater reaches than that, 
and in the quiet devotion of those rude workingmen to a 
pale, emaciated and probably rickety lumps of humanity, 
that they had never seen, but which lay in the humble bed 
of their fellow potter, is an illustration of that high tender- 
ness that is brave. In both cases the pictures are very sad, 
but as the good doctor well says, " They are better, much 
better, than many things that are not called sad." And 
they are better because they give rise to a tenderness that 
is not craven, a pity born not out of undisciplined nerves 
but out of warm hearts. This is a tenderness based not on 
the physical, which allie us to all animals, but on the spir- 
itual reality that relates us to God. 

Only the brave, then, reach that tenderness that makes 
one a servant of the Most High. " I have put my s})irit 
upon him," is the word of the old prophet. On that ac- 
count "The bruised reed shall he not break. He shall not 



52 TENDERNESS. 

fail or become weary. " We have quite enough, perhaps a 
great deal too much, of that emotion that ^'ends in itself, or 
at best in tears, or long-drawn breath ;" plenty of that ten- 
derness that stops with the wringing of the hands, that is 
so susceptible to good purposes, but is so negligent of good 
deeds : — that tenderness that is so anxious that a good thing 
may succeed, but is so careful lest the succeeding drain them 
of life's petty comforts and small securities. But we never 
have enough of that ^'pity as a motive'^ that quickens, 
gains power and gives purpose in the presence of suffering. 
This sympathetic tenderness is one of the most universal 
needs of the human soul, because it is felt through all ranks 
and conditions. It is the need of the gifted and the igno- 
rant, the want of the rich and the poor, the saint and the 
sinner. 

All this suggests the second element in that tenderness 
that belongs to the servants of the Most High, that makes 
ministers of the eternal gospel and protectors of bruised 
reeds, namely, disinterestedness. The more unselfish, the 
more divine is the tenderness. The most touchins: thiuG; in 
this story of the Cincinnati potters is not the thoughtfulness 
of the father, in whose heart the boy nestled all day long 
by a divine necessity. The boy's wan face kept flitting be- 
tween the father's eyes and his wheel hour by hour, his wasted 
fingers touched the father's fingers more palpably than 
did the clay he molded. That child was a part of himself; 
in loving the "wee lad" he was but loving his own, aye 
himself, and the bits of ribbon, crimson glass or fragrant 
buds that he carried home night after night brought quick 
and ample return to the fatherly heart in the shape of the 
gentle ^' thank you," the brighter smile and the more 
patient light upon the face. But all these motives were 
wanting among his fellow workmen. The dingy potters 
bad their birds in other nests, and the little jars etched with 



TENDERNESS. 53 

their stiffened fingers and tLe cups shaped with their simple 
arts would have been appreciated elsewhere. Their lives 
were not bound up in the crippled frame of the invalid boy ; 
there was naught of themselves on that sick bed ; and yet 
day by day the fruit was thought of, night after night the 
old man's hat contained the odd collection, — a collection 
gathered by a tenderness that was disinterested. Day by 
day the old man's labors were lightened, his hours by the 
bedside lengthened, through a tenderness that was unselfish. 
Friends, we should guard well our lives in this direction. 
Much selfishness lurks in our overweening anxiety and our 
unreasoning solicitude for our other selves. Our great ten- 
derness for OUT boy or our girl not infrequently ensnares us 
unto great harshness or most cruel neglect of some other 
one's boy and some other one's girl. We become so much 
burdened with our obligations to our homes that we forget 
the interests and needs of other homes. We become so 
jealous of the well-being and, as we say, future prosperity 
of our family that we lose that sensibility to the needs of 
society without which we become a burden and a blight. An 
exclusive tenderness often turns out to be a hurting selfish- 
ness. That child is cursed with the affection of which it 
holds exclusive monopoly. The homes whose doors do not 
swing easily^ut into the great world soon lose their home- 
like qualities. The heart treasures deposited therein often 
become non-productive, and curse instead of bless the 
inmates. The ohligations to husband, wife or child that are 
guarded by a fence so high that the claims of church, 
Sunday-school, society, state and all the wailing wants of 
the world are looked upon as rival claims to be jealously 
resented, will sooner or later build the fence so high that it 
will keep out many of the gentle influences, the sweet as- 
sociations, the divine amenities that make the fireside a bless- 
ed shelter from the storms of life and the home a peaceful 



54 TENDERNESS. 

haven for the aged. I once went to a man whose wealth 
was climbing on towards the millions with a cause which had 
legitimate claims upon his interest, because he was a part of 
humanity; his response was: "No, not a cent! It is an 
" excellent cause. It ought to succeed. But I have a family 
" and I must provide for them, I am getting old. A man who 
" does not take care of his own family is worse than an infidel. 
^' I have seen enough of this world to know that I would prefer 
" to see all my children buried to-day rather than to leave 
"them to the cold charities of the world." And as he 
spoke his voice trembled and the tears stood in his eyes. I 
doubted not the sincerity of that feeling, and I know that 
the practice of his life carried out the sentiment. Lavish to 
wife and children : in the main selfish towards all the rest 
of the world. The tears that stood in his eyes did no 
credit to his head, nor to his heart. They were born out 
of the sensibilities of selfishness, not out of disinterestedness. 
He failed to see that he was doing much towards making 
the world cold and uncharitable, not only to other children 
but to his own, and if the world of human life were made of 
such as he was at that moment, it were better his children 
were buried than living in it even though sheltered by his 
thousands. 0, that overweening tenderness of the mother, 
that guards her daughter from the discipline and joys of 
unselfish experiences, is not the tenderness that has in it the 
spirit of Grod ; rather is it the love that, anaconda-like, makes 
victims of those whom it embraces. 

The father who denies his child the discipline of that 
self-reliance that made him strong, turns his blessings into 
curses, and the arms that are thrown around fo protect the 
boy prove instead to be the paws of a bear that hug him to 
death : thus it is that the fortune of the father becomes the 
misfortune of the boy. Cruel is that wife who allows her 
love to make her husband more self- centered and helpless 



TENDERNESS. 55^ 

• after marriage than lie was before. Hurtful is tlie tender- 
ness of that husband whose very affection makes a drooping, 
dependent, clinging, characterless vine of the woman that 
G-od has endowed with a personality, capable of standing by 
his side equal with himself before Grod and man, a co- 
laborer and fellow -sufferer, a sharer of his joys and sorrows, 
joint partner with him in the work of enlarging the bound- 
aries of life. I doubt the happy outcome of the marriage 
that is centered simply in the dream of two made one, with no 
tender concern for the world, no hope to make its woes less, 
audits joys more by means of the proposed alliance. The 
young man and woman who join hands at the marriage altar 
for the simple- purpose of making each other happy are ever 
in danger of degenerating into seeking each one his own 
joys, and finding at last a large delusion at the bottom of 
the marriage cup. 

You will not misunderstand me. I revere the fireside and 
would fain ennoble and enforce all the sanctities of the 
home circle. The touching breadth of the tenderness of 
the grimy potters in Cincinnati illustrates my meaning. 
Think you that any one of those hundred clay-soiled and- 
dirty-handed workmen went home with a more petulant 
word to his wife, a less cheerful welcome to his own burly 
boy, because he had stayed fifteen minutes after time to 
shape that little pitcher for the sick boy ; or had taken twenty 
minutes of his noon hour to make a few pots to fill out the 
old man's stent that he might go home a little earlier ? Think 
you that any one of those hundred workmen appreciated his 
own shanty the less, because he had tried to make the home 
of the sick chiid more attractive ? Oh, the lessons that some- 
times come to us from the enriched homes of the poor ! We 
can but deplore the prosperity that leads men to be eco- 
nomical even of their tenderness. Let us beware of that 
thriftiness that doles out love where it is needed in abun- 



Ob TENDERNESS. 

d-mce. It is tlie danger of modern prosperity that it so 
complicates life, multiplies the needs of our outward homes 
and so regulates by conventional necessities every hour of 
every day, every ounce of every energy, that it leaves no 
time or force for the spontaneous workings of that Christly 
tenderness that redeems the sinner by kindness, and saves 
the world by love. Beware of that tenderness that uncon- 
sciously breaks a hundred reeds already bruised in trying to 
secure the one favorite reed from the possibility of ever 
being bruised. A sympathetic tenderness is the perpetual 
Pentecost that makes intelligible the language of each to all, 
and this commuion of spirit is ever reciprocal. It gives 
mutual strength. She who clutched at the hem of the 
helper's garments, who bathed with tears the feet of the 
friend of man and anointed his head for the burial ^-'wrought 
a good work" upon him, as well as found renewal and for- 
giveness in her own soul. Neither giving nor receiving is 
confined to any conventional equality. Jesus found it with 
the fishermen, the lowly men and humble women of Galilee, 
Samaria and Bethany. He gave it to and received it from 
'publicans and sinners, heretics and strangers. ! there is 
a sensibility yet to come that will show a pitiful brutality in 
the flippant epithets we now toss complacently from our lips 
as though they were the exact phrases of political economy 
and social science. The time is coming when men will be 
ashamed to chssi/?/ and divide with stolid cruelty their own 
kin ; those to whom they are bound by a thousand ties, subtle 
indeed, but strong and inevitable as Grod's law of gravita- 
tion. He who talks of '^ the masses," '^the dangerous class", 
"the hopeless class", " the abandoned", '-'the atheists", "the 
infidels", "the criminals", "the fallen women" and "the 
lawless men" in such a way as to leave himself outside and 
above them is a self-made spiritual exile, wanting that open 
vision and sensibility of soul that becomes a conscious child 



TENDERNESS. 57 

of Grod. Where tlie hea^-t is most human there is the 
most tenderness ; the higher and broader the soul, the 
greater the contact with others, — in the more points can it 
touch all other souls. With this breadth of life comes a 
sensibility worthy 

*'One who spite the wrongs that lacerate 
His weary soul did never learn to hate." 
''Maister John, I am for none o'yer strange nourse bodies 
for Ailie. I'll be a nourse and I'll gang about on my stockin 
'soles as canny as a pussie, " 

said James to the doctor when his wife had been helped 
back to her hospital bed. And so he did, 
''and handy and tender and swift and clever as any woman was 
that horny-handed little man. Everything she got he gave her. 
He seldom slept, and often I saw his small shrewd eyes out of 
the darkness fixed upon her." 

This was tenderness in the Poor ward of the Edinburgh 
hospital. 

'' Not one of them whispered a word, for this solemn thing was 
not to be talked about. Yet they put these things in the old 
man's hat where he found them. He understood all about it. 
Every day some one did a piece of work for him and put it on the 
sanded plank to dry, so that he could come later or go earlier, 
and when the bell tolled and the little coffin came out of the door, 
right around the corner, out of sight, there" stood a hundred stal- 
wart working men from the pottery, with their clean clothes on, 
most of whom gave a half day's work for the privilege of taking 
part in the simple procession and following to the grave that little 
child which probably not one had ever seen." 

This was tenderness in the Cincinnati pottery, 

<* Whosoever sjiveth a cup of cold water unto one of these little 
ones doth it unto me." 

<* Neither do I condemn thee : go, sin no more." 
'' Which of these three thinkest thou proved a neighbor to him 
that fell among the robbers? And the lawyer said: ''He that show- 
ed mercy unto him, and Jesus said: "Go thou, and do likewise." 

This is the tenderness taught by the great Master of 



58 TENDERNESS. 

tenderness, the world-inclusive heart of the Nazarene. Is 
this not also the tenderness of the hospital and the pottery ? 
Is it not the something that reaches from James Noble, the 
Ilowgate carpenter, up to the master soul of Jesus, touching 
human life all the way from one to the other; illumi- 
nating, transfiguring everything from the potter's wheel in 
Cincinnati, up to the cross on Calvary? 

This is the tenderness that Isaiah describes, as the indis- 
pensable attribute of the servant of God. It is not only the 
delicacy that goes with woman's fingers, that sends jellies 
to sick folks, and knows how to fix the pillow for the fever- 
ed head ; it can bear the sight of suffering. It is some- 
thing stalwart, that goes with manly men as well as 
with womanly women ; something that has courage . and 
out-go to it. It is a world-inclusive and life-redeeming 
power; something that rebukes complacency, shames 
indolence, and invests every vocation, all ages, every sex, 
every home, with its burden of care for the human reeds 
that are being bruised on every hand every day. This di- 
vine tenderness makes every one that partakes of it willing 
to contribute to the higher life of all. It does not say to 
the abiding interests of life, '' I hope you will succeed," but 
it says : " I will help you succeed." The question of every 
truly tender soul is not " What can the?/ do ? " but ^' What 
can /do?" 

If we have caught any glimpses of this mighty power to 
which to-day I give the name " tenderness," that is, love in 
its helpful moods, kindliness in action, the affections at 
work; not, as the good doctor says, " an emotion ending in 
itself or at best in tears and a long-drawn breath," but a 
motive that quickens, gives power and purpose. We see 
how much need there is of more tenderness in the 
world. I have met somewhere a story of a poor distracted 
man, who used to travel up and down one of the provinces 



TENDERNESS. 59 

of Prance, going from hou6Q to house, entering unbidden, 
wandering from yillage to yillage, accosting the men, women 
or children whom he met, always with the same question, 
— '' I am looking for tenderness, can you tell me where to 
find it ?" The simple country-side made light of his innocent 
wanderings and would say, "Have you not found it yet?" 
'' No," would be the sad reply: "and yet I have searched 
for it everywhere." "Perhaps you will find it in the gar- 
den." Off he would hurry. The gardener might refer him 
to the stable and the stable-boy to the next house ; the next 
house to the next village: so, mournfully, to the end of 
life, the poor imbecile, haljf conscious of his hopeless search, 
half realizing the ridicule with which he was everywhere 
received, died without finding it. 

Some of the earlier languages have but one word for 
inspiration and insanity : doubtless such cases as this helped 
establish the confusion. How often is uncommon sense 
found in the absence of common sense 1 and reason broken 
into bits, like the colored fragments in the kaleidoscope, 
sometimes gives . wonderful combinations of beauty. The 
story of this poor lunatic hints at a truth most pathetic. 
How hard it is to find tenderness ! Lives are blighted, 
fortunes ruined, homes made barren, high purposes in every 
community fall short of fruition, for want of that tenderness 
that is courageous and disinterested. Plenty of kindly 
passion in the world, perhaps too much. Not enough of 
kindly judgment and kindly will. Plenty of emotion re- 
presented by the burdensome Countess in the home of Amos 
Barton in George Eliot's story, who took great pains to 
perfume the poor sick wife's handkerchief and smooth her 
pillow, while she continued to eat the bread needed by the 
poor parson's children. Too little of that motive represen- 
ted by Mrs. Hackit in the same story, whose visit to the 
same vicarage brought the cooked fowl that was needed to- 



60 TiENDERNESS. 

strengthen tlie sick woman ; or still better the motive of the 
reverend Martin Cleves, the neighboring minister, who 
defended the injured man's good name in his absence, and 
was by his side in bereavement ; the man who went about 
" without carrying with him the suggestions of an under- 
taker." "Tender motive'' is a good phrase; it suggests 
force, motion, power; that which can be, if necessary, 
divinely cruel, the tenderness of the surgeon with his knife; 
the tenderness of God's unswerving law. Let us go in 
search of that, adding to the persistency of the lunatic the 
sanity of the man of Nazareth, and then we shall find it, or 
failing to find it, we shall realize what Longfellow calls the 
divine" 

•'Insanity of noble minds 
That never falters or abates. 
But labors and endures and waits, 
Till all that it foresees it finds 
Or what it cannot find — creates ! " 

This brings me to my last thought, — the power of this 
tenderness. This needs but little amplification, so well is it 
exemplified in the story of the Cincinnati potters. 

'' The entire pottery, full of men of rather coarse fibre by na- 
ture, grew quiet as the month drifted, became gentle and kind, 
and some dropped swearing as the weary look on the fellow- 
worker's face told them without mistake that the inevitable 
shadow was drawing nearer. " 

I do not ask you to believe the whole of this story, much 
less idealize it. It is easy to exaggerate the outward facts. 
I doubt not the reporter yielded to this temptation. Yet I 
believe in its essential truth because I have so often seen, as 
you have seen, the sanctifying power of a kind word, the reno- 
vating force in a tender deed, the enlarging power of a 
good word. The inward truth of this story we are ever 
prone to understate and underestimate. Father Taylor was 



TENDERNESS. 6l 

philosophically right when he said in his striking way, "It 
will never do to send Emerson to hell, for just as soon as he 
gets there he will change the climate, and the tide of im- 
migration will set in that way. " A noble impulse changed 
into a motive will silence the clamorous wranglings of sell&sh- 
ness. A noble man or woman will shed a radiance upon 
a ribald crowd, so as to make, for that short space of time at 
least, profanity and coarseness impossible. Do not drop 
back into a too-prevalent sentimentalism over this matter. 
Nothing but the courageous self-abandon of the highest dis- 
interestedness that seeks to do a kindly thing for the joy it 
gives to another, that the world, Grod's world and our home, 
may be made the better thereby, has in it this redeeming 
power. 

Once I lay, — a helpless, fever-smitten wreck, at the foot 
of a great tree just in the rear of a great battle-line. Now 
and then a stray minnie ball would reach my neighborhood, 
and vagrant shells, wandering far from their intended desti- 
nation, would burst in the air high above me. Troops were 
hurrying by, orderlies flying hither and thither, and ail 
around me were the torn and mangled, gathered in a field 
hospital. I, too weak to be of any use, too wasted even 
to cling to life with any tenacity, too sick to be afraid, 
lay there, — the most insignificant andhelpless private among 
the thousands, when there flitted by, with firm step and 
gentle face, a prim and dainty woman. She placed in the 
hand too weak to hold it a rosy, luscious apple. " You are 
thirsty", she said. "I will get you a drink." And soon 
she came with a spoonful of precious water in a tin cup. 
''It was all I could find, " she said. She went her way. I 
have all my life, before and after, been the recipient of ten- 
der deeds, but never have I seen the like of that apple, nev- 
er water so precious, nor a woman's hand that can-ied so 
much hope and renewal in a single touch. And thinking 



62 TENDERNESS. 

of it since, I suspect tliat a part— the best part — of that 
act lay in the fact that it was not for me as an individual, 
but for me as one in the files of a great and noble army. 
She came to me not because I was a friend, or a member of 
any narrow family, but because I was a brother man, the 
humble factor in a great movement. She was then and 
there the exponent of the divine providence. She was in 
league with truth, a messenger of love, a representative of 
God. I will believe that the infinite mystery out of which 
this Universe has been projected is a loving and lovable 
power, if that love finds expression and comes into con- 
sciousness only in that one bosom, that defied danger, lived 
above the horrors of war, that she might be helpful to me 
and others. I will believe in God and will say " Our Fath- 
er", aye and '^Mother", too, in my devotions because the 
power that evolves such tenderness blooms at times to fath- 
erly care and motherly affection in your heart and mine, if no- 
where else in all the universe. If there are souls to whom 
this world seems a goodless realm, who fail to find divine 
tokens of love anywhere, you and I are partly responsible. 
We have refused that spirit which invites us to become 
^^ those who cause law to go forth to the nations, not to cry 
aloud nor lift up the voice nor cause it to be heard in the 
streets", but to so live that no '^ bruised reed be broken" by 
us and no "glimmering flax be quenched." In us at least let 
that power send forth law according to truth. In us at 
least may it not " fail or become weary until justice is estab- 
lished in the earth and distant nations wait for the law." 
There ought to be divine tenderness enough in our lives to 
convert the most skeptical, to inspire the most obstinate man 
to divine service, and to make robust the will of the most timid 
woman. Who will say that the little Cincinnati hunch- 
back lived in vain, if in his short pain-stricken career he 
had hallowed the life of his father, chastened the lives and 



TENDERNESS. 63 

mellowed the hearts of his fellow laborers, and touched the 
potter's wheel with that same sacred oil of disinterestedness 
that consecrated the cross on Calvary, and perchance quick- 
ened us into more courage, fresh zeal, and touched us anew 
with love's pitifulness. 

Time is flying, each day counts its last opportunities. 
Oh ! that we may feel now the truth that came too late to 
the thriftless vicar, Amos Barton, in the story, as he stood 
beside the cold body of his sainted wife: "She was gone 
from him and he could never show his love for her any 
more, never make up for omissions in the past by showing 
future tendernesses." Oh, the bitterness of that midnight 
prostration upon the grave. If we do not awake to our part 
and responsibility under this law of tenderness I believe it 
will come to us some time. I hope and pray it may come, 
for better the pain and the life that comes therefrom than 
the insensibility and the living death involved therein. 

"Milly, Milly, dost thou hear me? I didn't love thee 
enough — I wasn't tender enough to thee~but I think of it 
all now," 



A CUP OF COLD WATER. 



" Who'^oever sliall give one of these little ones a cup of 

cold water only shall in nowise lose his reward," said 

Jesus. There 'could not well be a. simpler act, a smaller 
service, than that ; not one you would sooner do for those 
whom you do not like, or sooner ask from those who do not 
like you. Many a time, as Jesus walked the roads of Gali- 
lee, he must have stopped at the door of a stone hut or 
rested by a village spring and asked for a drink of water, 
just as we do in our country tramps. And some mother 
turned at the words, caught the look in the earnest eyes, 
and set down her child to bring the cup ; or some man, 
hailed at his plough across the field, pointed to the kid-skin 
bottle under the bush and told the stranger to help himself 
No one would deny it. Bread may be doubtful, but bubbling 
fountains, pouring rivers, shining lakes are cups so plentiful 
that few ever add to the prayer for bread, "Give us this 
day our daily water." So this teacher chose a cup of cold 
water as his emblem of small service, when he wanted 
to say that not the slightest deed that is meant for good gets 
lost and goes uncounted. The deed is appraised by its aim. 
He who offers the cup to the disciple as disciple offers it to 
the teacher, and he who offers it to the teacher as teacher 
offers it to him who sends the teacher ; and God takes notice, 
and the giver shall in no wise lose reward. So said Jesus; 
and he spoke the thought again in his '' Judgment" parable. 
Thrown out of concrete into broad impersonal phrase, the 
thought is that the smallest kindness to the humblest creature 
belongs to the great economy that we call Providence ; that 
thcii and there the laws of moral cause and effect begin to 



A CUP OF COLD WATER. 65. 

act ; so that, some way or other, full recompense for that 
small deed is sure. 

It is a mighty faith ! It is one of the words that show 
how deep-natured Jesus was, how keen his spiritual insight. 
Not a sparrow falls without the Father, not a hair eludes 
his census, not a drink of water is forgotten. You and I 
echo the words ; can you and I echo the faith ? But not of 
the faith, nor of the law of recompense that holds good of 
a drink of water, will we think just now, — only of the 
Cup-Offerings themselves, that is, of little acts of thought- 
fulness for one another. 

It is hardly an exaggeration to say that two thirds of all 
that makes it ''beautiful to be alive" consists in cup-offer- 
ings of water. Not an hour of life's journey but is render- 
ed easier by their freshening or harder by their absence. 
Why? Because most of us are burden-bearers of one sort 
or another ; because to most of us a large part of the journey 
is a dull and trivial trudge ; because there is much dust up- 
on the road, and — not so many bad places as probably we 
think — ^yet many common-places : and it is load and dust 
and stretches of the common-place that make one thirsty. 
If the feeling on our shoulders were of wings instead ot 
load; if on Mondays, "in some good cause not our own," 
we were marching singing to a battle, and on Saturdays 
were coming back victorious, then the greetings on the way 
would make less difference to us. But as it is, we crave 
the roadside recognitions which give praise for the good 
deed attempted, pity for the hard luck and the fall, a hand- 
lift now and then to ease the burden's chafe, and now and 
then a word of sympathy in the step-step-stepping that takes 
us through the dust. And this is all that most of us can 
wait to give, for we too are here on business. You can not 
step my journey for me, can not carry me on your back. 



66 A CUP OF COLD WATER. 

can not do me any great service ; but it makes a world of 
difference to me whether I do my part in the world with, or 
without, these little helps which fellow-travellers can ex- 
change. '' I am busy, Johnnie, and can't help it," said the 
father, writing away when the little fellow hurt his finger. 
"Yes, you could — you might have said 'Oh!'" sobbed 
Johnnie. There's a Johnnie in tears inside of all of us up- 
on occasions. The old Quaker was right : '^ I expect to 
pass though this life but once. If there is any kindness or 
any good thing I can do to my fellow-beings, let me do it 
now. I shall pass this way but once." 

*'An arm of aid to the weak, 

A friendly hand to the friendless, 

Kind words so short to speak 

But whose echo is endless, — 
The world is wide, these things are small, 
They may be nothing — but tJiei/ are all ! " 

^' A cup of cold water only." One must not forget when 
handing it, that the cup is one thing, the water quite another. 
Tin dipper or silver goblet is all one provided we are thu-s- 
ty and the water good. So the cup I speak of need be no 
Ehining deed of service, need be no deed at all; it is far oftener 
only a word, or the tone in a word, or the smile with a 
word. That word or tone or smile is the cuj), — and what is 
the tcater ? Your heart's sympathy. The fact that you 
are thinking a kind thought of me — you of me — is the re- 
freshment. That is what sends me on the road with the 
coolness felt along the veins. Of course, then, face and 
manner more than hands reach out the cup to me. The 
brusque manner of one friend, his tin cup, may be many times 
more welcome than the smooth manner — silver-plated gob- 
let — of another : it holds purer sympathy. The nod with 
a gleam in the eyes and a wrinkle round them may mean 



A CUP or COLD WATER. 67 



a deal more of heart's greeting than another's lifted hat. A 
^' Good morning ! " may be tendered so respectfully, — and 
you drop it at the next step as you drop a boy's hand-bill 
on the street, hardly conscious you have held it ; or it may 
come tossed to you, but with something in the face behind 
the toss that really makes the next few moments of the 
morning good. I can do you a great favor in such a way 
that you shall half-hate me and my favor : you can accept 
from me a favor in such wise that I shall feel as though I 
had been crowned ! 

Therefore there are many fine cups passed about that 
hold no water at all, or very little; cups really made for bric- 
a-brac, not service ; empty goblets of fashion and etiquette ; 
stage-tumblers which, we actors hand about momentously, — 
but with no possibility of spilling. Three common kinds 
of courtesy can make small claim to be "cups of cold water." 
First and worst is the politeness deliberately adopted to 
serve self-interest ; politeness by which we try to climb in- 
to people's esteem, intent upon their hen-roosts. In such 
courtesy it is of course we ourselves who drink the water, 
while going through all the motions of the Good Samaritan. 
Next and more innocent comes the conventional hat-and- 
glove and call-and-card politeness, so much more common 
east than west, and in Europe than America; whose ab- 
sence, like a wrong accent, betrays the untrained American 
abroad. This is the realm of Etiquette, and Fashion queens 
it there. Many of the customs she imposes are harmless 
enough, though staling all the freshness of one's manners; 
but many are dwarf-lies which taint the manner, until at 
last no sympathy that we can offer has the natural sparkle 
of sincerity. A thirH kind of courtesy, better far than this, 
but with little staying power to quench thirst, is the oif- 
hand geniality easy to those whose faces light up readily, 
whose hands go quickly out, whose voices have a hail-fel- 



68 ' A CUP or COLD water. 

low-well-met ring for every one ; a geniality that carries little 
though tfulness, little delicacy, little reverence, and no self- 
sacrifice; the manner, without the heart, of sympathy. It 
is soon understood. Of this sort we see more in America 
than in England, more west than east. 

And, in justice, let us say of this last kind that it is good 
as far as it goes. It is easy to slander the politeness of 
the surface. Even that second kmd has use as a preventive 
force. It is like the one policeman in the village, — only one^ 
but he diffuses an immense protection! It watches be- 
tween neighboi's, arresting little invasions of each other's, 
comfort, which, if not arrested, would so harass good fel- 
lowship. Some one has well said, " Politeness is like an 
air-cushion; there's nothing in it, but it eases the joints 
wonderfully." So call this politeness of the surface good, 
only not good for much. It carries small guarantee that 
the cup of water will be offered to the little ones, and still 
less that it will be offered when oneself is thirsty. 

But it is those " little ones " that give Jesus' saying its 
point. " AYhoso shall give one of these little ones a cup : *^ 
that takes the real sympathy, the real self-forgetting. And 
where three or four are gathered together in any relation of 
life whatever, there is almost sure to be a '• little one " with 
reference to the others, — one not so bright as they, not so 
winsome, not so able to hold his own. When but two 
meet, one is apt to be a little, the other a big one. And 
though to change the circumstances of the meeting is quite 
possibly to exchange the sizes, so that the little one becomes 
the big and the big one little, yet that still shows that two 
equals seldom meet. We can hardly talk together five minutes 
on any subject touching life without finding it full in our 
way to say something that may hurt and something that 
may help or please ; and those whom all like best largely 



A CUP OF COLD WATER. 69 

-win their love by this one secret, — uniformly they avoid 
the hurt and achieve the kindness, either being possible. 

For instance, in company — Boys, dance with some of 
those girls who have been sitting on the sofa ! Do it as a 
cup-offering of cold water, — for no more selfish reason. 
But then you do not know what grace it will give you in 
their eyes and in the eyes of all who enjoy true gentle-man- 
liness. I knew one rare in character and mind and 
popularity, who lingers doubly heroed in the memory of 
friends : they said of Lowell, "He died in the war, — and he 
■danced with the girls whom the others did not dance with." 
And Girls, when you are dissecting the young men in the 
party's after- talk, and some leave very little of one who is 
Tather stupid, stand up for him like an unseen sister, if you 
know him to be pure and manly ! If you belong to the 
isurgeon class of women, that fact probably comes out in your 
manner to himself, for you are one who is apt to miss the 
opportunity of giving the cup of water. Did you ever read 
what happened to get published under the title of " A Nice 
Girl's Rules," — rules made by a certain girl for herself when 
;shewent into company? They were five: "To give away 
more than I spend on myself. To do all I can for every 
one at home first, before I go to walk or to parties. At a 
ball to make one forlorn girl happy and introduce her to 
some pleasant gentleman, — and to do this at everi/ party. 
To draw other people out, without trying to shine myself. 
As soon as I feel that I am talking or acting in such a way 
that I should hesitate from shame to pray at that moment, 
to leave the room." 

Again, with the old, the conservative, the fixed, there is 
•constant opportunity to render service by the mere tone of 
the voice and the deference of the address. Don't they 
know they are old? Don't they often feel the fact of their 
conservatism helplessly, ajad therefore far more painfully 



70 A CUP OF COLD AVATER. 

than any one witli whom it chances to interfere ? Don't 
they suspect over-well that life is on the wane, and that the 
yellow leaf shows in their talk as they know it is showing 
in their face ? More than that of any other class, perhaps^ 
their appeal to the young, the strong, the capable, is for 
that courtly delicacy of attention which is shown not in an^/ 
richness of the cup, but in the way the cup is offered to the ' 
lips. 

Be a knight, be a lady, of the New Chivalry! Our 
words mount high, — from courtesy to courtliness, from 
courtliness to chivalry. The essence of chivalry is to look 
out for the little ones. We often talk of it as if it were a 
reverence due peculiarly to woman; and some fear that, 
should women enjoy political equality with men, chivalry 
would disappear. It would rather grow than disappear, 
even if that were all it meant, — reverence of man for wo- 
man ; for it is a deepening reverence, deeper far than the 
mediaeval sentiment, that underlies and prompts our modern 
movement in behalf of woman's rights, — and that which be-' 
gins in a deepening feeling is not likely to endanger the ex- 
pression of the feeling. But chivalry means far more than 
reverence of man for woman. It means reverence ot 
strength for weakness wheresoever found. Men often need 
more of it from a woman than they can possibly give to 
her. Chivalry is that in me to which every one whom I 
have power to injure can appeal in virtue of that fact with 
the unspoken plea, ''You mvst use your power to bless!'' 
Wherever a child can be helped, wherever a stranger can be 
guided, or a friend who is shy be set at ease, wherever a 
weak brother can be saved from falling and its shame^ 
wherever an old man's step can be made easy, wherever a 
servant's position can be dignified in his eyes, — is the 
chance for chivalry to show itself. I do not recognize a 
different feelino; in the one case from that which moves me 



A CUP OF COLD WATER. 7l 

in the other. The white-haired man, the tired errand-boy, 
the servant-girl with the heavy burden, make the same kind 
of demand upon me; and all of them make more demand 
than the lady whose very silk will make people enough look 
out for her. They all challenge my chivalry, that is, my 
sense, not of generosity, but of ohligation to help, just be- 
cause I can give the help and here is one who needs it. 
Noblesse oblige ! 

And because we already see the Kingdom come in rare 
souls here and there, we may look forward to the time when 
chivalry shall have in common parlance this broadened 
meaning; when to the employe in the store, to the poor in 
the shanty, to the servant in the kitchen, one will feel more 
honor-bound to be thoughtfully attentive, so far as rights 
and feelings are concerned, than to any others in the circle 
of our friends. To be rough to social superiors may show 
something of the fool, but to be rough to inferiors certainly 
show in us something of the savage and the brute. ^' Who- 
ever gives these little ones the cup," we read. The littler 
the one, the more imperious will become the impulse to 
offer it, the more impossible it will be to be untender. 
Selfishness will have to be kept for equals, if for any. At 
present it is usually the other way. The lady often wears 
her patience with her ribbons in the parlor, and her impa- 
tience with her apron in the basement ; and at the house- 
door, in. the shop, and in the court-rcom, the poor man is 
apt to have the fact of poverty stamped into him by those 
who to equals are urbane and to superiors right worshipful. 
And yet it takes so little to make us in humbler station or 
of humbler powers bless those who are above us, — so little 
to make those poorer than ourselves in any way bless us ! 
Not money, not gifts, but the simple evidence of respect 
for the station and those in it, of fellow-sympathy in their 
wants and their anxieties, of appreciation of their difficul- 



iZ A CUP OF COLD WATER. 

ties — a pleasant, cheering, equalizing word — will be a very 
Jesus-cup of cold water to many a rough-faced man and 
slovenly dressed woman in the forlorn districts of our city. 
When happiness can be manufactured so cheaply and sells so 
high and is always wanted in the market, it seems a pity 
that of us more do not set up in the business. Listen to 
this story from Turgeneff's '• Poems in Prose :" 

'- 1 was walking in the street, — a beggar stopped me. a frail 
old man. His tearful eyes, blue lips, rough rags, disgusting 
sores — oh, how horribly poverty had disfigured the unhap- 
py creature ! He stretched out to me his red, swollen, 
filthy hand ; he groaned and whimpered for alms. I felt 
in all my pockets. No purse, watch or handkerchief did I 
lin^. I had left them all at home. The beggar waited, 
and his outstretched hand twitched and trembled slightly. 
Embarrassed and confused, I seized his dii'ty hand and 
pressed it : ^ Don't be vexed with me, brother ! I have 
nothing with me, brother.' The beggar raised his blood- 
shot eyes to mine, his blue lips smiled, and he returned the 
pressure of my chilled fingers. ' Xever mind, brother,' 
stammered he ; ^ thank you for this, — this too was a gift, 
brother." — I felt that I, too, had received a gift from my 
brother." 

Even our dumb animals appeal for •'• chivalry.*' They, 
too, are persons] they are '-members*' of our household. 
'- Treat a cow as if she were a lady," is the inscription over 
the barn-door of one of our gTeat "Wisconsin dauw-men. 
'• J/y dog." •• my horse." I say, — but that dog belongs first 
to himself before he belongs to me : even his body thus, and 
his soul is all his own. '- Show me a bill of sale from the 
Almighty !" said the Vermont judge to the slave-hunter 
claiming his "■ property." Our creature's due is something 
behind mercy — justice. It has rights. To become the 
'•owner" of an animal is to enter into a contract with a fel- 



A CUP OF COLD AVATER. 73 

iow-creature, a very " little one," — and at once the Grolden 
Rule and the laws of ethics begin to apply. And surely 
the census of these " little ones" will soon include the birds. 
Millions of them have been slain each year of late simply to 
deck our sister's hat ! But the mother-heart of England 
and America is at last beginning to remember that every 
soft breast, every shining wing, worn on a hat means that 
some mother or father-heart, a tiny heart, but capable of 
loving and toiling for its brood, has been pierced through 
just to set the decoration there. And this in the nineteenth 
century of the Christ-love ! Will you not join that Total 
Abstinence society whose pledge for women is, " No mere 
ornament of mine shall cost a life;" whose pledge for men 
is, '' No mere spor?^ of mine shall cost a life, no death shall 
make my holiday "? 

And now what shall we say of these cup-offerings in the 
Home ? That they are of more importance there for true 
house-furnishing than either money or good taste or both 
combined. "What are they there at home? Pleasant 
Smiles ; gentle Tones; cheery Greetings ; Tempers sweet 
under a head-ache or a business-care or the children's noise; 
the ready bubbling-over of Thoughtfulness for one an- 
other, — and habits of smiling, greeting, forbearing, thinking, 
in these ways. It is these above all else which make one's 
home " a building of Grod, a house not made with hands ;" 
ihese that we hear in the song of "Home, sweet home." 
Into a five hundred dollar shanty put strangers who begin 
to practise the habit of anticipative thoughtfulness for each 
other, and we have a "home." Put husband, wife and the 
'three children into a fifty thousand dollar house, and let 
them avoid this interchange of gentleness, and we have 
only family-barracks. 

Perhaps the best single test of a man lies in the answer 



74 A CUP OF COLD WATER. 

to tlie question, What is he where he is most at home ? If 
there, where he is most familiar and in power, considerate- 
ness lessens and tenderness evaporates and talk grows master- 
ful, as if he had more rights than his wife, then the heart 
is shallow and the character is thin. At home one should 
be his best, his most graceful, most entertaining, most agree- 
able, — and more so ten years after marriage than ten days 
after. The same, of course, with her. Yet strange to 
think how many persons save their indifference for this one 
place that should be all tenderness ; how many take pains 
with their courtesy and geniality abroad, but at home glide 
into the habit of letting geniality be taken for granted in- 
stead of being granted. That tells in the course of years ; 
for the cold moods, the silent ways, the seeming-harmless 
banterings, are the ways and moods that increase with the 
years. By and by, when the children are growing up and 
growing away from us, and we are growing old and would 
like kind words and looks a little more ourselves, we shall 
wish for our own sake and for theirs that we had done dif- 
ferently. 

Men often think, " They love us and we know it ; we 
love them and they know it." Nay, but it is ?io^ enough to 
have the love and do the duty in silence. We live not by 
bread alone, but by evety word that proceedeth out of the 
mouth of those we love. Out of the mouth, — it is the 
spoken love that feeds. It is the kindness offered that fur- 
nishes the house. Even we men who push it coldly away 
want to have it offered somehow, sometimes, by the wife, 
the sister, the children; now and then they want it visible. 
The presence of those children in the rooms is a constant 
importunity for the outspoken, not the silent sort, of love. 
Children bare of kisses seem cold as children bare of clothes. 
• We have seen children who evidently did not know how to 
kiss their fathers, — they went about it, when they had to, 



A CUP OF COLD WATER. 75 

SO shyly and awkwardly, — and were forgetting how to kiss 
their mothers. And as for women, it is a woman who writes, 
and all who have a mother or a sister know how truly she 
writes, — " Men, you to whom a woman's heart is entrusted, 
can you heed this simple prayer, 'Love me and tell me so 
sometimes' f Nathaniel Bowditch, author of the famous 
" Navigator", added to his fame by formulating this law in 
the science of married life : " Whenever she came into my 
presence, I tried to express to her outwardly something of 
the pleasure that it always gave me." A navigator, that,, 
worth trusting ! On the other hand, there are homes whose 
atmosphere suggests that the man has never told the wo- 
man that he loved her — but once, and that then he was 
exaggerating. The loneliness of sisters unbrothered of 
their brothers ! The loneliness of wives unhusbanded of 
their husbands, — who go back to the store, the club, the 
lodge room night after night, and scarcely see their children 
to get acquainted with them save on a Sunday afternoon i 
Yes, and sometimes the loneliness of men ! What half- 
tragedies in homes we know, our thought falls on at these 
words ! Homes that began as fresh and bright with love 
as*ours, with as rich promise of joy, with as daring a trust 
that the years would bring new sweetness and carry none 
away, — now, homes where the sweetness comes like the 
warm days in November and the heart-numbness stays and 
grows like the cold. The lonely ones can hardly tell you 
why themselves ; but you and I perhaps could tell them 
why. One writes, '' I have known a wife who, though she 
nursed his children, and took care of his household, and 
sat down with him to three daily meals, was glad to learn, 
her husband's plans and purposes through a third person, ta 
whom he had spoken more freely about the things of deepest 
concern than he could ever speak to her. The inexpressi- 
ble pain caused by withheld confidence, the pressure and 



4 b A CUP OF COLD WATER. 

nightmare of a dumb, repressed life, soon did its work in 
changing her fresh and buoyant youth to gray-haired, pre- 
mature age." Have you never seen a death, or at least a 
casting sickness, like that which Harriet Hunt called 
•^' Found Frozen'*? 

*' She died, as many travelers have died 
O'ertaken on an Alpine road by night, 
Numbed and bewildered by the falling snow ; 
Striving, in spite of failing pulse and limbs, 
Which faltered and grew feeble at each step, 
To toil up the icy steep and bear, 
Patient and faithful to the last, the load 
Which in the sunny morn seemed light. 

And yet 
'Twas in the place she called her home, she died ! 
And they who loved her with the all of love 
Their wintry natures had to give, stood by 
And wept some tears, and wrote above her grave 
Some common record which they thought was true t 
But I who loved her first and last and best, — I knew V 

Nor is it enough to have moods of affectionate expres- 
sion. That would be like trusting for your water to an in- 
termittent spring : the thirst will come when the water is 
not there. The habit of love-ways is the need. In many 
a home neuralgia or dyspepsia or the business-worry makes 
the weather within as changeable as it is without in a New 
England spring : sometimes a morning greetmg all around 
that seems like a chorus to one's prayer, and then a table- 
talk of sympathy that sends one bravely out to his work, 
and one cheerily about her house, and the children brightly 
off to school, each with a sense that the best time in the day 
will be the time which brings them all once more together, 
— sometimes so, and sometimes a depot-breakfast where no 
eye meets eye, and you hear yourself eat, and the stillness is 
brok'.iu by dish-jogglings and criticisms on what is in the 



A CUP OF COLD WATER, 77 

dishes, or what ought to be and isn't, and then a scurry oiF 
like boys from school. 

How is it with ourselves ? Each one had better ask him- 
self the question in the quiet now and then. Are our 
homes more tender than they were a year ago, or has love 
grown dimmer in them? Are we closer to each other's 
hearts, or more wrapt up in silent selves ? Do we spring 
more readily for those who call us by the home- names, or 
do the old sounds make eyes a little colder turn to look? 
Are the year's best festivals the anniversaries of the home- 
love, — the meeting-day," the engagement-day, the marriage- 
day, the birth-days and the death-days ? It is not bread 
you chiefly owe your family. Father. It is not mended 
clothes, Mother. It is not errands done and lessons learnt, 
Children, that makes your part. It is the loay in which 
the part, whatever it be, is done that mahes the part. The 
time comes when we would almost give our right hand, could 
we recall some harsh word, some indiiFerent cutting manner, 
some needless selfish opposition. Happy we, if the one 
gone out from our homes into the unseen Home has left us 
no such ache to bring the bitter tears! "Too late, — too 
late to love him as we might, and let him know itT^ "Too 
late to let her know that we knew she was sweet! '* Among 
all "might-have-beens" does the wide world hold another 
one so sad? There is only one way to make that sad 
thought die, — and that is to clear untenderness utterly 
from heart and from the manner towards the others who 
still make home "home" to us, to re-double thoughtfulness 
for them, and try to fill up the measure of the missed love 
there. When, at last, the tenderness of our bettered service 
is blossoming evenly, unfailingly on the root of that old sad 
memory, perhaps we can feel self-forgiven and at peace. 

One question more. Is it easy, after all, to offer simple 



78 ■' A CUP OF COLD WATER. 

cups of cold water? This analysis makes us feel tliat un- 
adulterated cold water may be a rarer liquid than we 
thought; and that if one offers it to ''little ones," offers it 
habitually, offers it when thirsty himself, and seeks for op- 
portunities to offer it, the spring lies not on the surface but 
in the depths of character. More than most other signs 
such cup-offering tells of a nature sweet and sound at cen- 
ter. It is comparatively easy under duty's lead to brace the 
will and go forward, dreading but unflinching, to some large 
self-sacrifice ; but harder far through sickness as in health, 
through tire as well as rest, throug)^ the anxieties as through 
the quiets of life, to be sure to lift a mere cup of water to 
even a brother's lips. If you are sure to do this for any 
body as for a brother, you are glorious ! 

So hard sometimes are these small deeds that there are 
cup-liftings of history and legend that have grown prover- 
bial as types of self-forgetting. You remember the old Bible 
story about David's three heroes who brake the ranks of 
the Philistines to bring their thirsty king a cup of water, 
and what, when he had got the draught, he did with it to 
honor them and God; and that widow who gave the hungry 
prophet her last handful of meal — and there was famine in 
that land. You may have read of the Mohammedan who 
lived in a city built amid a wide hot plain, and who made a 
wayside booth a few miles out on the highway, ?.nd daily 
ivent to fill a vase of water there for fainting travellers as 
they approached, — and once it saved a life. And of Sir 
Philip Sidney all have heard, — how he, the wounded Gen- 
eral, paused on the moment with hand half-lifted to his lips 
and gave his draught away to the private, wounded worse, 
— the ''little one." Brother-souls to Sir Philip were the 
soldier in our own war, who, burning with thirst from a 
wound in the mouth, refused to touch the canteen lest the 
blood from his torn lips should spoil the water for • the 



A CUP OF COLD WATER. 79 

wounded comrades lying near ; and that Frencli soldier wlio 
begged the surgeon to keep his ether bottle for men hurt 
worse than he, and stifled his own groan with his bloody 
handkerchief. Are such acts rare ? No doubt : yet think 
not that they happen by the ones and twos. Probably no 
battle-field but in its red dew blossoms with these acts of 
brotherhood, — of angelhood. 

But when such things happen on any of the battie-fields 
of life, believe not, either, that the deeds hegin upon those 
battle-fields, that they are the first heroism of their doers. 
Only souls wonted to sweetness and self-forgetting brim over 
with it at such hours. The little thing that makes a mo- 
ment great is never all done at the moment. True — and 
what a prophecy it is for human nature! — true, an average 
man, in health, will sometimes on an instant ris$ to the 
death-height of self-forgetting ; for a stranger's sake he leaps 
into the sea to save, he leaps before the rushing engine. 
But in his agony does a man reach even the cups height for 
another, unless the years behind have made him ready for 
his instant ? Such little acts as Sidney's and our soldier's 
therefore live as the ideals of service, and set the standard of 
cup-bearing. They set the standard where Jesus would 
have set it; — where he did set it when in his own agony he 
prayed, *' Father, let this cup pass from me, — yet not my 
will, but thine be done!" They uplift us to the under- 
standing of his thought that whoso does these things to 
^Uittle ones " does them unto God. 

And then the great thought comes full circle : we see that 
we can only do a deed to Grod by doing that deed /or him, — 
only by offering ours as the hands with which it shall be 
done. Our human love for one another, and all our human 
help, is not less his for being ours. ^' Grod's tender mercy " 
is the name in heaven for what we call on earth — ^^a drink 
of water." Many dear things of providence he hands to 



so A CUP OF COLD WATER. 

his little ones hy each otlier. Sometimes, how can he reach 
them else? And sometimes, whom can he use but you and 
me? 



THE SEAMLESS ROBE. 



''Now the coat was without seam woven from the top through- 
out." — John xix, 23. 

The unquestioned tendency of all science is toward Unity. 
With every advance in knowledge some apparent disordeT 
becomes orderly ; the (disjointed becomes jointed. No mat- 
ter how exceptional a fact may appear, when closely studied 
and mastered it quietly takes its place as a link in the end- 
less chain of law ; it becomes at once the effect of some 
antecedent cause, and the cause of some subsequent effect. 

Professor Tyndall, in a presidential address to the Brit- 
ish Association some years ago said, that the most im- 
portant discovery of the century is that known as the 
'^ Correlation and Conservation of Force." This principle, 
so startling when first announced, is now a matter of in- 
teresting but familiar demonstration to our public school 
children. Heat, light, electricity, chemical action, etc., 
instead of being distinct properties inherent in the matter 
that reveals them, are but varying modes of motion, 
differing phases of the undefined reality which science 
calls force. These manifestations, which a hundred years 
ago were supposed to be not only different but antag- 
onistic elements in nature, are now made to play hide-and- 
seek under the hand of the experimenter. They change 
their guise as often and as promptly as the fabled gods of 
G-reece. One of the first discoverers in this direction was 
our own Benjamin Thompson. He was born in Massachu- 
setts in 1753 and sailed for Europe just before the revolu- 
tionary war, and there became so eminent in science that 
he was titled. He took his new name from the New Eng- 



82 THE SEAMLESS ROBE, 

land village in which he taught at the age of seventeen, and 
is known in history as Count Rumford. While inspecting 
the boring of cannon in the Munich arsenal, he discovered 
that the increasing heat in the brass came not from some 
latent quality released by pressure, as was the common 
opinion, but that it was the transformation of the force ap- 
plied to the drill. To state it in its most simple form, the 
heat came not from the brass but from the horse that fur- 
nished the power. The muscular energy of the horse was 
changed into the motion of the drill, and this in turn be- 
came the heat of the brass. The same transformation takes 
place when the hands are warmed by vigorous rubbing. 
The sudden application of the brake to the rolling car wheel 
is changed into heat and oftentimes into light. You feed 
the tack machine that cuts off six hundred tacks a 
minute with a strip of cold iron, but if you pick up 
one of the tacks, made in the wink of an eye, it will burn 
you. The heated steam moves the piston. In the calci- 
um light we have heat converted into light. In pho- 
tography light becomes chemical action. The electric 
light that enables the diver- to study ghastly scenes in the 
cabins of sunken ships ; the bar of iron that is charged with 
magnetism, when it is encircled with an electric current; 
the chemical affinity that precipitates the metallic solution 
upon the printer's form, immersed into the copper bath, 
thus making the electrotype plates from which our books 
are printed, are a few illustrations of the thousand ways 
in which this principle is utilized in the amenities and hu- 
manities of the industrial arts. 

More sublime are the exemplifications of this principle in 
the great changes that take place in the laboratory of nature. 
Gravitation precipitates cosmic matter into our planetary 
center. It becomes the heat and light of the sun. These 
are reconverted into the power that lifts the clouds out of 



THE SEAMLESS ROBE. 83 

the ocean, condenses them on mountain side, distills them 
again upon meadow aad woodland. Under the guise of the 
laws of vegetation forests are reared to be again buried, 
condensed and preserved in the coal-beds of the world. 
Grloomy bank-vaults are these in which are deposited the 
accumulated sunbeams of millenniums. Through the oven 
and the loaf these again become the human muscle and 
brain, the -highest efflorescence of which is the poet's rhap- 
sody and the lover's ecstacy. Through the cornfield the 
sun finds its way into the horse that strains the collar, and 
the hand of the man that holds the guiding rein. 

The earlier nature-worshippers were poorly agreed in their 
devotions; some worshipped the stars, more the sun, some 
revered the lightning, whilst still others were awed into fear 
or touched with reverence by meteoric stone, tree, flower, 
bird or beast. Now there was meaning in their devotion 
but little sense in their quarreling. It was the same divine 
mystery that consecrated each shrine ; the same divinity 
made holy each altar ; it was the same Grod, masking in all 
these ever shifting forms. In all their mumblings we read 
Tude phrases of the universal ritual; the soul of man 
joining in the worship that will never be outgrown"; a worship 
inspired by, and directed to, the reality which Herbert 
Spencer calls 'Hhe cause which transcends our knowledge 
and conception, in asserting which we assert an unconditional 
reality without beginning and without end." 

The history of religion as well as that of science proves 
that however ignorance, superstition and bigotry may tug 
away at different sections of nature's robe, it, like the coat 
of Jesus, is woven from the top throughout without seam. 

See how this law of unity weaves all human experience 
into one seamless robe. The older school-books taught 
confidently of five senses, seeing, smelling, hearing, tasting, 
feelino; : but the newer science resolves these five back into 



84 THE SEAMLESS ROBE. 

one and says they are all phases of tlie one sense, toueli.. 
When the waves of the unknown something are gathered 
upon the retina of the eye the optic nerve reports the 
touch. When they strike more heavily and slowly the 
drum of the ear, the auditory nerve feels and reports the 
touch. Smell is the touch of the nostril and taste the touch of 
the mouth. Language is the primal inspiration. Even the 
bad grammar of the children frequently contains a subtle, 
philosophy, and so we find that the intuition of speech an- 
ticipated the latest physiology, when it led us to confound 
the adjectives of sensation, as when we speak of '^ sweet 
sounds," ^^soft pictures," " smooth colors," " rougli smell" 
and '' hard flavors," or as when the Scotchman says, ' 'I feel 
a smell." 

Turning from body to mind, the true conception of soul 
leads us to distrust the so-cailed science of phrenology, that 
pigeon-holes man's brains like a modern post office. The 
bumps and lines within which certain faculties are supposed 
to act represent at best but a small side of the truth. Soul, 
like body, has an unquestioned unity. Strengthen it any- 
where, and you contribute to the vitality of the whole. 
The solving of a mathematical problem clears my brain for 
sermon writing. The musical power of the composer is 
heightened if he spend a part of his time in the laboratory. 
Doctor Holmes writes better for his experience in the dis- 
secting room. Nature must not be limited, as Wordsworth 
reminds us, 

'' to light of setting suns, 
Blue ocean and living air ; 

but in the mind of man there is 

'' A motion and a spirit tliat impels 

All thinking things, all objects of all thought, 
And rolls through all things." 

The Conservation and Correlation of Force is a spiritual as 



THE SEAMLESS ROBE. 85 

well as a material truth. There is an essential unity of the 
moralities, an identity of the virtues. The excellencies are 
correlated. Like the physical phenomena light, heat and 
electricity, courage, truthfulness and humility play the one 
into the other. Says Bartol, ^' We speak of cardinal virtues, 
but every virtue is cardinal." We talk too flippantly 
about " essentials" and ^' non-essentials" in morals. There 
are no unimportant things in conduct, no " non-essential" 
duties. In ethics as in phrenology we sacrifice truth to 
clearness when we tabulate our virtues, and speak of hon- 
esty, generosity, temperance, industry, as if it were 
possible to realize one without realizing all. The honest 
man has a keen sense of the value of a minute. The 
prompt man is industrious, the industrious man is never 
-dissolute, the man that is never late at an engagement is 
pretty well along towards sainthood ; he will pay his debts; 
.and he will not be afraid to die when the time comes. 

All the virtues are correlated. True valor on the battle- 
field bespeaks a man that is tender to woman and gentle to 
children. Given an absorbing enthusiasm in any direction, 
be it the perfection of a machine, the cataloguing of fishes, 
the accumulating of honorable wealth, or the advancement 
of an idea, and you have a moral force that is translatable into 
all the virtues ; a persistent energy that will overreach the 
boundaries of one life ; like the induction that flashes the 
message of one telephone wire on to another, it is a virtue that 
will jump from soul to soul, will pass from home to home, 
from generation to generation. 

Some years ago I was invited to call upon a young man 
in one of our western towns whose body was already made 
transparent by the ravages of consumption. His voice was 
nearly all gone, he could speak only in a whisper. He sat 
propped up in his chair, working diligently at a catalogue of 
the insects of Colorado, the study of which he had made while 



86 THE SEAMLESS ROBE. 

an invaKd exile. He was anxious to complete his task be- 
fore the final orders came that would muster him out of this 
earth service. Ee had no time for foreboding or regret; 
there were no shadows in the room, it was filled with a light 
that streamed from his earnest eyes. And as I looked more 
closely I found that he was scarcely more than a boy ; yet he 
had made himself an authority on the insects of at least 
•three of our Western States. On his table were letters 
from men eminent in science in Europe and America, anx- 
ious to profit by the observations of this young man who 
was dying in a Western town. Soon after my visit, the 
papers annouDced the death of the young scientist ; they 
talked of a " career cut short," a " loss to the world," " dis- 
appointment," and so on, but, sad as early death is, there 
was far more joy than sorrow in his translation, more life 
than death in it all. What began in a boyish love of but- 
terflies, grew, in twenty-five or six years, — what a short 
life ! — into a virtue that was transformed into the inquisi- 
tiveness of a thousand children in the neighboring schools; it 
molded the better ambition of his city; it laid the founda- 
tions of an academy of science, which is one of the most ' 
creditable and best known of the kind in the west. The 
grave had no victory over such a life, and death had no 
sting to J. Duncan Putnam, the young and lamented scien- 
tist of Davenport, who so early found a place among the 

"choir invisible 
Of those immortal dead who live again 
In minds made better by their presence ; live 
In pulses stirred to generosity, 
In deeds of daring rectitude, in scorn 
For miserable aims that end in self, 
In thoughts sublime that pierce the night like stars* 
And with their mild persistence urge man's search 
To vaster issues. ^ * ^ -k- * -x- 
* * This is life to eome, 



THE SEAMLESS ROBE. 87 

Which martyred men have made more glorious 
For us who strive to follow." 

If Professor Tyndall is right in speaking of this princi- 
ple of ^' Conservation and Correlation of Force," as the 
most important scientific discovery of the century, is not the 
spiritual application of it quite as important to religion and 
morals? It is important because — 

1. It simplifies the problem of living. 

2. It multiplies the encouragements of life. 

Let us attend to these separately. Many of the anxieties 
of conscience cease when we fully reahze that doing good 
work anywhere for anything is weaving the seamless robe 
of character. Cumbersome codes of Egyptian laws and 
ancient customs were condensed into the Ten Command- 
ments. Jesus reduced these ten into the one command- 
ment of love. Rabbi Hillel, who was an old man when 
Jesus was a babe, when asked by a disciple if he could state 
the whole law while standing on one foot, said, " Yes, thou 
shalt love thy neighbor as thyself." A pupil asked Con- 
fucius if the whole law of virtue could be stated in one 
word; he promptly replied, "Reciprocity!" — The golden 
rule in five syllables stated three hundred and fifty years 
before it was pronounced by the persuasive lips of the Naza- 
rene ! Under this law of unity, problems of salvation and 
patriotism are identical. One's duty to self, home and race 
are inseparable. Be a good workman and you are a good 
citizen. Be a good citizen and you are fitting yourself for 
heaven. ''Be just before you are generous," is a favorite 
maxim with business men ; but like many another shrewd 
Yankee saying it contains a large fallacy. Cease tearing the 
seamless robe. There is no generosity that is not grounded 
in justice, and certainly you cannot be just without being 
generous. The theologians have had a hard time of it in 
trying to reconcile infinite justice with infinite love. In 



83 THE SEAMLESS ROBE. 

their trouble they missed the correlation; no more intimately 
wedded are light and heat in the economy of the universel 
than are justice and love. 

'•All of Grod is in every particle of matter," said the old 
philosopher. So all of goodness is in every duty. "Let 
thy whole strength go to each." Believe in the lesson of 
the Seamless Robe, and religion becomes to you a city like 
ancient Thebes with an hundred gates, through any one of 
which you may enter. "All roads lead to Eome," was the 
old saying. The same may be said of heaven if only the 
road be such as duty travels upon. 

"How shall I be saved?" Not by creed or vicarious rite, 
but by doing well your simplest duty, attending to the near- 
est call. Rubenstein used to say, "I make my prayers at the 
piano." Agassiz dedicated " Peniskee" to the study of na- 
ture by bowing his head in wordless prayer. The books say 
that Angelo's face grew radiant as the marble chips flew from 
his chisel. Each of the three divisons of Dante's immortal 
poem ends with the word "stars." Through the agonies of 
thought and the frenzy of poetic imagination did he win 
the celestial vision. These stories are illustrations of high 
piety, because any virtue is linked to all the virtues, and 
every excellency is a part of the great excellent. 

I have already anticipated the second point. This sim- 
plicity brings cheer. This linking of the virtues en- 
courages us. We are glad to* take the task Providence 
places upon our door-step this morning. Science interprets 
the gospel, — the good news of Jesus. It says to the as- 
tronomer "Watch your stars;" — to the farmer "Hold 
steady your plough ; " — to the blacksmith 'i Believe in your 
forge;" — to the housewife " Glorify your needle, look well 
to your oven and attend to the babies." To one and all it 
says, " Pour generously the water of your life into any or all 
of these runlets and they will combine into brooks; the 



THE SEAMLESS ROBE. 89 

brooks will find the river, and tlie rivers all flow oceanward. 
* Inasmuch as ye did it unto one of the least of these, ye 
have done it unto me.'" 

In Eighteen Hundred and Sixty-One the north sent her 
boys to the battle front on the southern fields, where many 
of them, — pressed by danger, — won the apotheosis of char- 
acter. Some time afterward it sent down another lot of men 
in the name of Christianity to scatter tracts, to pray for and 
superintend the religious interests of these boys. Some of 
these latter men were the callow fledglings of the divinity 
school, — wanting in the courage to stand where brave men 
in those days should stand if higher duties did not prevent, 
I have seen cowards with shameless impudence undertake to 
teach heroes religion ; nerveless drones talking piety to those 
who every day carried their lives in their hands for an idea. 
There was more saving virtue and heavenly grace in the self- 
control that kept vigilant the tired boy on his midnight 
watch, than in a carload of this poorer kind of Christian 
Commission men that flocked to the 

** Field that was farthest from danger," 
with their haversacks crammed with the publications of 
the American Tract Society. The sentinel was developing a 
virtue that stopped not with the surrender of Robert E. Lee. 
It went on to conquer the prairies of Kansas and Dakota, 
and to touch with intelligence the wild canons of the Rocky 
Mountains. The valor of the field appeared again in gen- 
erous forbearance towards a fallen foe. The mothers that 
kept back the tears that might discourage, the girls who 
wrote the tear-stained pages full of laughter, that the camp 
might be less irksome, were unintentionally making contribu- 
tions to the centennial glories that came later. Slowly but 
surely is this doctrine of the Seamless Robe investing con- 
sciously all sections of society. Some years ago I heard this 
doctrine quaintly but forcibly urged in the legislature of 



90 THE SEAMLESS ROBE. 

Indiana. An appropriation towards building a belt rail- 
way around the Capital city was under discussion. A rep- 
resentative from one of the rural counties of the state, 
somewhat noted for its oratory, had the floor. After consid- 
ering the commercial importance of the scheme, waxing 
warm he met the argument of the opposition that it was a 
local interest, consequently not a matter for state patronage, 
as follows : 

^^ Grentlemen, I represent Jackson County, a great way 
from the city of Indianopolis, but I support this 'yer bill, for 
I maintain that it makes no difference whether you live on 
the waist-band or way down in the pocket, it all goes the 
same to the strength and glory of the pantaloons, you can't 
Jiolp Indianopolis without holping Jackson county : it all 
goes to the holp of the great state of Ingianer, the third agri- 
cult'rul state in the Union." 

Judging from the current discussions in religious confer- 
ences, I suspect that there is many an accomplished Doc- 
tor of Divinity in this country who fails to see as clearly or 
state as tersely the doctrine of the Seamless Robe that invests 
humanity, as this legislator. Be honest, then, be loyal; 
above all things be sensible and loving, for they all contri- 
bute to the glory of earth and the peace of heaven. 

Let us study the other side of this law of morals. The 
vices of life are interchangeable, as well as its virtues ; sins 
are transmittable as well as graces. Moral bluntness in one 
thing dulls the conscience in all directions. One perversity 
renders the soiil callous to many evils. The vices are all of 
a family, — children of the same parentage. Every sin in 
the calendar is a burning jet of vicious gas, which flows 
through channels under ground from the same retort, from 
which flows the baneful fluid that burns in other and distant 
jets. Here as elsewhere it is dangerous business to classify. 



THE SEAMLESS ROBE. 9L 

Nature is slow to recognize lines. We must remember that 
all vice is vicious and that every sin is sinful. Let us talk 
plainly. When I speak of the sins of dishonesty and theft, 
hearers are thoughtful ; but if at the same time I speak of 
the sins of tardiness, procrastination and loafing, they smile 
and think I have made a ''good point;" — as if these were 
not vices more nearly related than electricity and magnet- 
ism; as if he who goes through life tardily does not go 
through life dishonestly. He robs his fellow beings of the 
most valuable commodity God entrusts to his care, — time; 
so valuable is time that Grod gives but a moment of it at 
once and never gives that moment but once in all eternity. 
Again, when I talk of harlotry, women hang their heads in 
thoughtful shame, but when I speak of extravagence in dress, 
a vulgar love of display, a wicked sacrifice to fashion, a de- 
sire to merit the social rank in which character does not 
form the chief test, people smile and think the preacher is 
riding his hobby ; although it is a matter of scientific dem- 
onstration that these latter vices are being daily transmu- 
ted into the former as directly as motion is converted into 
heat or the solar ray into vital energy. That the habitual 
use of intoxicants is a sin against the physical and social 
economies of life is generally admitted in these days; but 
when, backed by the most deliberate science, it is urged that 
the habitual use of tobacco is a sin against the body and 
society, even women smile as though it were " another hit,'* 
and if I undertake to seriously apply the simplest principles 
of morality to the affairs of the oven and the kettle, to apply 
the commonplaces of physiological science established be- 
yond a doubt, as any intelligent physician will tell you, the 
smile becomes a laugh. We are shocked and alarmed when 
the laws against careless use of gunpowder are violated and 
lives and property endangered thereby, but wives introduce 
into their drawing rooms, mothers carry on their side-boar ds» 



:92 THE SEAMLESS ROBE. 

even churclies make sacramental uses of tliat whicli carries 
greater social dangers, and which is a thousand times more 
destructive of life and property, than gunpowder and all its 
tindred explosives. 

All this proves that we do not yet adequately understand 
the sermon of the Seamless Robe. We do not sufficiently 
Tealize the cc»rrelation of the vices and the conservation of 
evil. We need more clear thinking. A stronger intellectual 
grasp of this law alone will bring finer moral sensibilities. 
People trifle only with what they consider trivial. These 
things mentioned disconnectedly may be trifling, but the 
connection is certain, God is persistent and omnipresent. 
Science is more successful than religion in enforcing this 
lesson of the Seamless Robe. The Rip Van Winkle " we 
won't-count-this-once " cannot ease the enlightened con- 
.science; every "once" is counted by nature's detective. 
Every violence is recorded; every shock to love bargains for 
hate somewhere. 

It requires a scientific test less delicate to demonstrate the 
inevitable connection between domestic extravagance and 
forgery, bad cookery and inebriety, than is neccessary to 
prove the relations between electric currents and the cir- 
culation of the blood. 

I have said that the virtues of war were transmitted into 
the graces of peace, but the dissipations of camp were also 
perpetuated. The old demon of slavery changed its name 
aod reappeared in political corruption; it mounted the stump 
and dealt in partisan swagger, in the venom of party 
hatred and sectional prejudice. The jay-hawking of the 
march ripened into plunder of pubhc funds for private ends, 
the shameless appropriation of national domain to personal 

gains. 

<< Out of evil, evil flourishes, 
Out of tyranny, tyranny buds." 



THE SEAMLESS KOBE. 93 

He who suppresses his conscience just a httle, enough to 
take the road of expediency into the citadel of success, has 
taken the left hand road that leads direct to all the miseries. 
The woman who expects to atone for a flippant word by 
subsequent grace, has been flirting with all the disgraces. 
^' Take home one of Satan's relations, and the whole family 
will follow," is an old proverb that fits into the new science. 
When the correlation of moral forces is better understood, 
we shall have fewer gluttons preaching temperance ; fewer 
dyspeptics urging moderation; fewer gossips insisting on 
charity, less bigotry mistaken for piety, and fear of hell 
will be less often taken for religion. 

The boldest synthesis is yet to be made. The final thing 
to be said is that in the spiritual life there are not two seam- 
less robes, but one. I may have seemed to assume a line 
where no line finally remains: not only are the virtues corre- 
lated, and the vices interchangeable, but the vices and the 
virtues are invested with the same seamless robe. There is 
a law for lawlessness. Sin is no abnormal cloud thrown in 
between man and Grod by some regnant devil. What is it, 
then ? Now it is weakness, deficiency of force ; it is darkness, 
the absence of light ; it is cold, the absence of heat ; again it 
is misdirected energy: it is fire on the housetop, and not on 
the hearth; it is the river overflowing its banks; it is un- 
disciplined power. "G-ood, in the making,'^ says Emerson. 
" That rough movement toward the good which we call evil,'^ 
is Leigh Hunt's phrase. The forces that tend even to sin 
are sacred forces. Shall we not heroically labor for the con- 
trol of the horse upon which we are to ride into strength 
and glory? Welcome the awful rapids. Welcome the 
thousand isles and the terrible dangers therefrom. Give 
me that tremendous responsibility which compels me to steer 
so near disaster that I may thereby sail the St, Lawrence of 



94: THE SEAMLESS ROBE. 

life, and find at last the vastness of the ocean. We will seek 
not to imprison but to liberate energy. We will not try to 
grow our oak in a flower-pot, but will plant our acorn in the 
middle of the field. Religion has no more use for a broken 
spirit than a general has for a jaded horse. Better 
a sinning Saul of Tarsus than a sinless Xicodemus. Better 
a wayward Loyola than a submissive Simon Stylites. as the 
gequel of their hves proves. Better a fiery France than a 
quiescent Italy. Xot too much pride but too Kttle ; not too 
much freedom but too little; not too much love of life and 
the good it contains have we. but too httle. By directing, 
not suppressing the forces within us. shall we realize and ap- 
ply the gospel of the Seamless Eobe. 

'- The Seamless Bobe !"' — ever suggestive in its symbolism. 
first of the inclusive spirit of the master who wore it ; less 
mindful of its value than the Eoman soldiers, the sects have 
torn the Christian unity that ought to be based upon his words 
and life. Again it symbolizes the still larger unity of Uni- 
versal Eehgion. — that golden cord that binds all humanity 
around the feet of Grod, of which Christianity is but one 
strand albeit the best, because it is the tenderest ; the strong- 
est because it is the most silken. A third time it may sym- 
bolize the continuous existence, the endless life— a robe wov- 
en from the threads of time and eternity. This time let it 
stay with us, as a symbol of the highest truth, the in- 
clusive unity, the ?/r/ /verse, fhe universality of law. the indi- 
visible and eternal God. Blessed be science for its enforce- 
ment of this lesson. Above the voice of prophets do we 
hear its tones saying : 

*•' Whosoever shall break the least of these commandments and 
teach men to do so, shall be called least in the Kingdom of 
Heaven ; but he that is faithful in that which is least, is faithful in 

that which is much." 

Beahzing this, duty becomes the Seamless Robe. It be- 



THE SEAMLESS ROBE. 95 

comes the unbroken and imperishable will of Grod, and life is 
given us to weave this coat without seam by filling all our 
days with faithfulness, and our years with loyalty. 
^* All service ranks the same with God. 

If now, as formerly he trod 

Paradise, His presence fiUs 

Our earth. 

*' Say not < a small event ! ' why small ? 
Costs it more pain that this, ye call 
A 'great event' should come to pass, 
Than that? Untwine me from the mass 
Of deeds which make up life, one deed 
Power shall faR short iu, or exceed! " 



WRESTLING AND BLESSING. 



A fossil lies before me on the table where I write, — a 
little triiobite, that serves now for a paper-weight. There 
he lies just as he stopped in his last crawl or swim some 
million years ago, the body half-bent, the stony eyes still 
staring ! One can not help wondering what stopped him, 
how it happeced, and what else had happened in that far- 
off life when those black rings were supple and the eyes 
saw, I wish I knew his story. You have the Venus of 
Milo, perhaps, on the bracket in your parlor, — that proud 
marble beauty whose mystery her keepers in the Louvre 
have in these latter years been trying to guess anew. It 
would be pleasant if we had some record how she came 
under 'Hhat little Melian farm," from whose furrows she 
was unburied, so blurred with stain and maimed and aged, 
but able still to make men mute with delight. We wish 
we knew who felt the first delight of her, when she was 
young ; who gave her early praise ; in whose workshop she 
grew to such majesty of form. 

Somewhat so is it with the old legends in our Bible. We 
wish we knew how, when, where, by whom, they came 
into existence. There are a hundred of them, some beau- 
tiful, some uncouth, some villainous in look. Now they 
lie fossilized in myths, — mysterious fragments, like old 
statues. Once they were living and moving; once they 
were coming into being as beliefs. These stories have had 
a life-history in men's minds and hearts. Take the Jacob 
story (G-en. xxxii, 24-31), where Jacob wrestles through 
the lonely night with the angel. To trace its origin, we 



WRESTLING AND BLESSING. 97 

should have to go back to very ancient times, when men 
were on right familiar terms with Deity, and when the 
Hebrews still had many gods and Jehovah, not yet the 
One, was but the Arch-Power who helped their tribe. 
What the beginning ©f this special story may have been, 
probably no one will ever tell except in guesses. Possibly a 
dim, misshaped tradition of some actual event lies hidden in 
it. Perhaps, like similar Scandinavian stories of the giants 
challenging the god Thor, it had a long pre-existent saga-life 
from mouth to mouth, before it reached a record. Its origin 
may have been an early bard's attempt to account for the 
people's name of Israel, " Prince with God," by fathering it 
on a brave deed of some ancestor. But whatever its source, 
to trace it we would have to leave the mental climate of 
to-day and, turning back, re-enter an atmosphere where the 
faith of the people crystallized itself in legends of the super- 
natural as naturally as the January mist deposits itself in 
snow-flakes. 

Such legends rise in many ways. "We find their relics 
strewing the beginnings of all literatures, embedded in all 
old faiths. And this Bible of ours would be the rock with- 
out the fossils, would be that Mehan farm without the 
statue, if it did not hold these things. The trilobite is no 
sacred beetle to us ; but I regard mine with some awe, — it 
is so much older than I ! We do not worship the Venus ; 
but she is a joy forever, in America as in old Greece. Let 
us use old Bibles in the same way, bringing that kind of 
reverence, and none other, that each thing in them de- 
serves from to-day. Let their beautiful things be beautiful, 
let their wicked things be wicked, let the curious things be 
curious, and the true things, the grand things, be true and 
grand. The book is but the rock or the farm; what lies in 
it gives the worth. And, as a whole, the worth of this, our 
Bible, is very great. Much besides the fossils and the frag- 



98 WRESTLING AND BLESSING. 

ments lies therein. Even they, when they no longer are 
believed as facts, serve still as poetry, supplying hints and 
emblems for the spiritual experience, — as with the very ex- 
ample cited, the wrestling that brought blessing. What 
exhales and vanishes as Scripture floats far and wide as 
hymn, — like that other Jacob story now sung in the " Nearer 
my God, to Thee." What falls from belief as story of 
Jacob or of Jesus, begins to fill a still higher, wider place to 
us as history of the human mind in some old attitude of 
worship. 

The gist of our Jacob legend is simply this : Jacob wres- 
tles through the lonely night with a strange, strong Power, 
that maims him; but, instead of yielding, he clings and 
wrestles on, and will not let go wrestling until he lias ex- 
torted, a blessing from his hurter. And when, in turn, he 
asks the stranger's name, no name is given him; but Jacob 
guesses it is his Grod, and calls that night's struggiing-place, 
" Grod's Face." And he limps off in the morning lame in 
his thigh, but a crowned victor ; and for his prowess wins a 
new name, " Israel," or " Prince with God." 

Here we have something very fine, — a meaning universal, 
and fresh as yesterday's struggle with our own life's diffi- 
culty. The teaching is that Wrestling is the condition of 
Blessing, — that the long, determined clinch brings corona- 
tion, and makes a new man of us, — maimed, perhaps, but 
still a nobler and stronger man than before the struggle. 

A most aged doctrine ? Yes: all the old religions ring 
with it. Most commonplace ? True : the elements of hero- 
ism are very commonplace. Those short two-worded sen- 
tences from Paul (2 Cor. vi. 4-10; iv. 8, 9, 16-18), that 
sound like leaping bugle-calls from one in the front, are just 
it, — this aged doctrine about struggle. Half the chapters of 
Epictetus are battle-music on this one theme. But because 
each one has to find out for himself how true the doctrine 



WRESTLING AND BLESSING. 99 

is, and has to find it out a great many times before the faith 
becomes as much a part of him as it is good to have it, let 
us draw it out and say it over ence again. 

How do we treat our difficulties f That is the question 
that has no second. It stands all by itself in its importance. 
The answer to it gives our destiny. How do we treat our 
-difficulties ? Do we take their maiming only, or do we win 
their bles&ing too ? The question that has no second. 

Difficuk^es, not difficulty. They are many, and of differ- 
ent kinds, although their hurt in essence is the same, and 
their gift in essence is the same. 

1. First of all rises up that difficulty known as the In- 
lierited Burden, You probably have one. A dull brain 
perhaps, or some weak organ in your body, or the outlaw 
passion in your temperament, the brute in the family blood 
that ought to have been tamed by our grandfathers. We 
will not complain, but who would not have made himself a 
little brighter, had his opinion been asked at the right time? 
How many of us, forty years old, but have ached in the 
same spot where our mothers ached, and because they did, 
and been able from that ache to predict afar off which of 
the wheels of life will perhaps stop first and stop all the 
rest ? And who can help sometimes charging the hardness 
of his life-struggle, or his failure in the struggle, to those 
two persons in the world whom he loves dearest ? 

We will not complain, I say; but it is getting easier every 
day to complain weakly of this burden and yield to it in 
miserable self-surrender, because we are just finding out, by 
the help of the doctors and physiologists and the new phi- 
losophy of organic nature, how much we may in perfect 
honesty attribute to it. The old dogma said that we in- 
herited our sin, and that all our woe was brought into the 
world with that garden-sin in Eden ; and this dogma was a 



100 WRESTLING AND BLESSING. 

dim hint of tlie great fact recognized by our evolution doctrine 
of to-day. But, after all, that gardener was so far away that 
we could not practically reach him to lay our personal re-^ 
sponsibility off upon his shoulders. To-day we are learning 
to see right in our homes our Adam and our Eve, who have 
actually inlaid our body, mind, and tastes with their 
bequests ! And, as this knowledge grows, weak hearts are 
likely enough to abate their trying, because (they say to them- 
selves), " He and slie are to blame, not I." And one effect 
of our evolution theory may be to make more cowards and 
renegades in life. 

Weak hearts and renegades, indeed ! As if the knowledge 
did not teach this rather, — that, if the responsibility be less, 
ihefate is even stronger than we thought, and needs the 
stouter wrestle ; and this, too, — that, if in one way the respon- 
sibility be less, it is greateningin two other ways. Knowing 
the tendencies received from father and mother, we know 
the special dangers that are threatening in our natures, and 
therefore what we mainly have to guard against: and to- 
day we knowingly, no longer unknowingly, transmit our 
influence to our children, — and men and women awake to^ 
suffering they inflict are doubly holden for it. This new 
emphasis upon inheritance, truly understood, is both comfort- 
ing and spurring. Comforting, for to those who mourn 
over-much at what they see in their little ones, thinking it all 
their personal bequest, it says : ^' You are responsible only 
for the half or the quarter part of this : for the whole ances- 
try has been counted into you, and through you reaches 
yours." Comfort that, when, after all your trying, your 
boy turns out badly, or your daughter dies young after suf- 
fering six years. And the new knowledge spurs, because it 
says to parents, " For part of your children's birth-fate you 
are responsible, since by patient energy your dull brain can 
be a little quickened, your blood can purify itself, your body 



WRESTLING AND BLESSING. lOt 

€an make its weak places somewhat stronger, and, above all, 
your unbalanced temperament can be controlled and trained 
and much ennobled; and if you make these self-improve- 
ments firmly yours, they may be largely handed on to them,'' 
That we are not fit to have our children, unless we have 
trained ourselves beforehand for their birth, — is what 
our evolution doctrine says to us; and thereby it will gradu- 
ally become a great uplifting and salvation to the race. 

The earnest wrestler, knowing this, will never wholly sur- 
render to the poorness of his brain or his body or his 
temperament. Not to poorness of the 5ram ; for that dull 
head that we inherit may go with days that shall leave us 
perfect in self-respect, although dull-headed. No sight is 
more impressive than that of humble self-respecting workers, 
boys or girls, or men or women, who, day in, day out, do 
their duty in the quiet stations where small talent hides 
them, representing the Moral Law Incarnate in )their little 
corners. Not to the poorness of one's hody : what sight 
more beautiful than the patience, the self-forgetfulness, the 
wide and eager pity for others' trouble, which suffering 
sometimes generates in the life-long sufferer who bears her 
weakness greatly, although in other ways her service has 
to be the service of those who cannot even '^ stand," but have 
to lie^ " and wait"? Who has not known or heard of some 
mighty invalid who found sphere and mission-field on a sick- 
bed? 

Not even to the poorness of one's temperament will the ear- 
nest wrestler yield. There is one example in the world more 
touching and inspiring even than these last. It is that of a 
man wrestling hard with his inherited burden when it takes 
the form of a Besetting Sin, — which is very apt to be that 
brute in the family blood. But even if it be a devil of his 
■own wanton raising, we watch him, we cheer him, we tell 
jhim we know all about it, and that he is doing nobly and 



102 "W^RESTLING AND BLESSING. 

helping us in our struggle; we pity him, if he falls; we rever- 
ence him as holy, if he wins. Let such a struggler know 
that we know he is the hardest fighter of us all. And if he 
wins, his besetting temptation actually turns into his guar- 
dian angel, and blesses him through life. Our besetting sin 
may become our guardian angel, — let us dare to say it ! Let 
us thank God that we can say it ! This sin that has sent me 
weary-hearted to bed, and desperate in heart to morning 
work, that has made my plans miscarry until I am a coward, 
that cuts me ofi" from prayer, that robs the sky of blueness, and 
the earth of spring-time, and the air of freshness, and human 
faces of friendliness, — this blasting sin that has made my 
bed in hell for me so long, — this can he conquered, I do not 
say annihilated, but, better than that, conquered, captured 
and transfigured into a friend : so that I at last shall say, 
^'My temptation has become my strength ! for to the very 
fight with it I owe my force." We can treat it as the 
old Romans treated the Barbarians on their frontiers, — turn 
the border-ruffians within ourselves into border-guards. 

Am I speaking too confidently? But men have done this 
very thing, and why may not you and I ? Who has not his 
besetting sin to be transfigured thus ? But it will take the 
firmest will we have, the clearest aim, the steadiest purpose. 
It must be for the most part a lonely Jacob struggle. The 
night will certainly seem long. And yet, in our clinch, the 
day may dawn before we think it, and we shall have won 
the benediction and earned the name of " Israel, Prince 
with Grod," and learned that even besetting temptation 
may be " Grod's Face," — but that wredling^ and lurestUnp' 
ordy^ is the condition of such blessing* 

2. These are forms of that main difficulty called the " In- 
herited Burden." There are others close akin, called by the 
general name '' Hard Lot^ " Hard Lot," — again the ver^ 



WRESTLING AND BLESSING. 103 

name is a challenge to our sleeping powers. The hard lot 
called Poverty, Ignorance, Narrow Conditions, Accidents, is 
waiting to give us, after the struggle, Temperance, Diligence, 
Fortitude, Concentration. But after the struggle; that is, 
as we wrestle with those conditions, these elemental powers 
are waked in us and slowly trained, and at last are left ours, 
— our instruments by which to carve out life's success and 
happiness. 

A boy in the town has no chance for education like the 
boys of richer fathers in the neighborhood, — no college, no 
high school even; or the yearning for education has come 
after the school-days are over. Will that boy, like Theodore 
Parker, the farmer's son in Lexington, turn the pasture 
huckleberries into a Latin Dictionary? or like Chambers, 
the great Edinburgh publisher, will he learn his French and 
science in the lonely attic, after the fourteen hours' work at 
the shop are done ? Will he, like Professor Tyndall, rise 
every morning, for fifteen years, and be at his books by fiNO, 
o'clock ? A girl in the town seeks for a "one-thing-to-do" to 
save herself from a frittered life. Harder yet it is for her 
than for the boy, for social custom is against her. Will she 
be daring, and not only daring but persistent ? The history 
of achievement is usually the history of self-made men and 
self-made women ; and almost invariably it is the history of 
tashs^ if not imposed by the hard lot of circumstance, then 
self-imposed. The story of genius even, so far as it can be 
told at all, is the story of persistent industry in the face of 
obstacles, and some of the standard geniuses give us their 
word for it that genius is little more than industry. A 
woman like "George Eliot" laughs at the idea of writing her 
novels by inspiration. "Genius," President D wight used 
to tell the boys at Yale, "is the power of making 
efforts." 

A man sees some great wrong in the land. No money, 



10-i TTRESTLING AND BLESSING. 

no friends, little culture, are liis. He hesitates, knowing not 
v/hat to cio; but the wrong is there, it burns in him till some- 
how he finds a voice to cry against it. At first only a faint 
sound heard by a few who ridicule and one or two who say 
Amen. And from that beginning, through the ridicule and 
violence, ^4n necessities and distressses, in labors and 
watchings and fastings," he goes on, ^'as sorrowful, yet al- 
ways rejoicing, as ]3oor, yet making many rich, as having 
nothing, yet possessing all things," till men are persuaded 
and confounded and the wrong is trampled down and the 
victory is his! Such things have been done within our 
knowledge. The two men who started the anti-slavery 
movement in this land were a deaf saddler and a journey- 
man printer, both of them poor in every thing but daunt- 
less purpose. At Philadelphia, a few years ago, a band of 
gray-headed men met to look back fifty years and talk over 
their morning battle-fields in that great cause accomplished. 
What a lesson of faith those Abolitionists have taught the 
nation, — faith that a relentless wrestler can win blessings 
from the Hard Lot and the Untoward Circumstance ! 

3. A third well-known fighter waits in the dark to throw 
us: he bears the name Our Failures, How well we know 
him ! "What a prince of disheartenment he is ! What argu- 
ments he has to prove to us that trying is no more of any 
use 1 He is our arch-devil. And he, too, and because arch- 
devil, will be our arch-angel, if we will have it so, — the one 
who warns and guides and saves. Half, two-thirds, of our 
best experience in life is his gift. 

Look along any path of life at the stateliest figures walk- 
ing in it. They are, most of them, figures of men that 
hay e failed more than once. Yes, any path. ^^It is very 
well," said Fox, the great English orator, "very well for a 
young man to distinguish himself by a brilliant first speech. 



WRESTLING AND BLESSING. 105 

He may go on, or he may be satisfied. Show me a young 
man who has not succeeded at first, and has yet gone on^ and 
I will back him.'" Every one has heard of Disraeli sitting 
down writhing under the shouts of laughter with which his 
dandy first speech was received in Parliament. " I have 
begun several times many things, and have succeeded in 
them at last," he said; " I will sit down now, but the time 
will come when jomvill hear ?7ie." And it did come to 
even a dandy, who could " begin many times." When 
John Quincy Adams's Diary was published not very long 
ago, it was strange to find him, as a young man, lamenting 
his absolute inability to speak extempore. An ineradicable 
difficulty, constitutional, he thinks, — and he died known as 
'' the old man eloquent." These happen, all of them, to be 
the words of orators ; but success in all lines of life is reach- 
ed, or not reached — is lost, — by exactly the same principle. 
Whatever the high aim be, " strait is the gate and narrow 
the way " which le^ds to success in it. The great chemist 
thanked God that he was not a skillful manipulator, because 
his failures had led him to his best discoveries. The famous 
sculptor, after finishing a great work, went about sad: 
" What is the matter ? " asked his friend. '^Because for 
once I have satisfied my ideal, and have nothing left to v/ork 
toward." He wanted to fail just a little ! Said a successful 
architect of the young men in his office, who kept on copying 
his designs, " Why do they do the things they can do ? 
why dont thej do the things they cantf' Miss Alcott 
wrote and burnt, and burnt and wrote, until at last her "Lit- 
tle Men and Women" came out of the fire. By the failure 
in art, by the failure in science, by the failure in business, 
by the failure in character, if we wrestle on, we win salva- 
tion. But all depends upon that if. Our failures pave the 
road to ruin or success. '' We can rise by stepping-stones 
of our dead selves to higher things," or those dead selves 



106 WRESTLING AND BLESSING. 

can be the stones of stumbling over wbicb we trip to de-r 
struction. 

4. Again, have we ever known what it is to wrestle with 
Wrong done to us, — wrong so bitter, perhaps, that the thought 
brings shadows on the face and seems to be a drop of poison 
in the heart? And have we learnt from it, as many have, 
what Paul's " Charity" chapter means, what inward sweet- 
ness forgiveness has, how we can almost bless our injurer for 
the good he has done us in thus teaching us to know our 
weakness and calling out our better nature to conquer our 
poorer ? " It is royal to do well and hear one's self evil spo- 
ken of," said an old sage. Royal; but blessed to be able to 
have that feeling toward the evil speaker, which is not con- 
tempt, and is not pride, and is not wholly pity even, but real 
and living friendliness welling up through our wound to- 
ward him by whom the wound was made. 

5. Have you never wrestled with Religious Doubts ? 
Sometimes not the bottom of our knowledge only, but the 
very bottom of our faith in goodness, seems to give 
out. Perhaps some fearful tragedy has happened. Death 
or pain on its mighty scale has stalked abroad ; or some 
great sin is triumphant, and the dishonest man, the mean 
man, the selfish man is exalted, while goodness has to hide 
its head, and it seems as if it were madness to talk about 
the Eternal Righteousness. Perhaps our own life's disap- 
pointments have soured our hearts and blurred our eyes, 
till the brightest scene of pleasantness can wear November 
grays, and we say, " It is always winter, and never spring, 
to us.'* Perhaps dear old ideas, around which our grati- 
tude and reverence have twined, are in decay, as new light 
breaks in from undreamed-of realms of thought ; from an 
evolution theory, upsetting and resetting all our history of 



WRESTLING AND BLESSING. lOT 

providence ; from a theory of mechanism in mind and mor- 
als, which seems at first glance to turn ourselves into physi- 
cal automata and to dim all hope of a life beyond the body; 
from a vision of Law, Law, Law, till we see no room in the 
universe for a Law-giver, no place in our experience for 
singing songs and looking gladly upward. And if, having 
felt these doubts, you have wrestled with them, not bidding 
them go, not letting them go, but holding on to them, and 
thinking deeper, reading farther, looking more patiently 
and less dogmatically, — above all, living more purely and 
unselfishly, — have you not found the chaos turning at least 
by patches into cosmos, as the brown fields of April take 
on their green ? Have you not caught here and there a 
vision, which for the moment made the old peace come again ? 
Have you not found that life, the greater bringer of mys- 
teries, was somehow also the great solver of mysteries ? 
If not you^ many a man lias thus " beaten his music out'^ 
from the solid arguments of despair; has known what it is 
to pass from drifting doubts, not into certainties, but into 
Trust that has to be spelled with capitals, if printed ; Trust 
that can tell its meaning best, not by any explanation, but 
by cheer and serenity and a feeling as of awed triumph in 
life and in death ! 

6. Once more. Death : have you ever wrestled with 
the death-sorrow till you know its inner sweetness ? Sweet- 
ness greater than all, I would almost say. The loss is loss. 
We say, perhaps, " It is their gain," and wish to be willing;, 
but we are not willing. Our hurt gets no relief. The days 
go by, and the emptiness is as empty, and the silence as 
silent, and the ache as relentless in its pain. What shall we 
do? Our iriends look on, and wish that they could help 
us. And they know that help will come, because to their 
own wrestling it once came. They know that the heart of 



108 WRESTLING AND BLESSIXG. 

this pain is joy indeed. And if you ask how it came about 
in distress so very sore as yours, their differing words will 
probably amount to this : that such pain can be stilled in 
one way only, and that is by being more actively unseJfed^ 
by doing more for others right through one's sadness, by 
trying hard to do simply right. It takes a wrestle, yes ; but 
they will assure us as an inward fact, whose chemistry they 
do not pretend to understand, that helpfulness and duty 
done at such a time deepen and sweeten into something 
wiihin ourselves that almost seems a new expeiience from its 
exceeding peace. It is not time making us '-forget/' — nay, 
just the opposite : we know that somehow this new peace is 
vitally connected with that pain ; and, at last, we come to 
think of them and feel them together. Later, we begin to 
call it peace, and forget that it was pain. And, by and by, 
the hour in memory which is our lingering-place for quiet, 
happy thoughts is the very one which is lighted by a dead 
friend's face. It is our heaven-spot ; and, like the fair city 
of the Apocalypse, it hath no need of sun, for the glory of 
that face doth lighten it. Perhaps, as life goes by, there 
will be more than one of these green pastures with still 
waters, in our inner life. x\nd then we shall find out that 
each death-sorrow is unique. From a brother's or a father's 
loss one can but dimly understand, I suppose, a mother's feel- 
ing, when her child has vanished. Each death is so unique 
because each life and love has been unique. Xo two deaths 
will bless us therefore just alike, and we can stUl name our 
new strength or our new trust from the separate love : it 
still is •• Katie's'' gift, or it is •• Father's" gift. And thus 
the very highest and deepest and holiest of our experiences 
in some way wear the likeness of those friends that we 
have lost. 

It is only anotlier instance of the correlation of Pain with 
Grain — through struggle ; the correlation of difficulty with 



WKESTLING AND BLESSING. 109- 

exaltation — througli wrestling: tlirough the struggle, tlirongh 
the wrestle, through our will facing the hard thing, clinching 
it, never letting go, until we feel the gladness crowning us. 
We speak of the " ministry" of sin, of suffering, of disap- 
pointment, of sorrow, and speak truly ; but none of these 
" minister," not one, until they have been mastered. First 
our mastery, then their ministry. We say, " The Lord hath 
chastened us :" yes, but by summoning us to a wrestle in 
which it is our part never to let go! It is not the 
mere difficulty that exalts. None of these six or seven 
things that I have spoken of, neither the Inheritance, nor 
the Temptation, nor the Hard Lot, nor the Failure, nor the 
Injury, nor the Doubt, nor the Death, suffices by itself to 
crown us. They may just as likely crush or warp or embit- 
ter us. They do crush very many ; and if they do not crush 
or embitter you or me, it is because we have used our wills 
against them. They only give the opportunity, and we de- 
cide whether it be opportunity for bondage and maiming, or 
for the blessing and the new name "Israel." All depends 
on us. 

On us, — ^but only, after all, as all things which we do 
depend on us. On us, because the Powers which are not 
ourselves work jointly with us. Not what we can not do 
only, — as making roses, earthq.uakes, solar systems, — but all 
that we can do also, — breathing, eating, thinking, — con- 
fesses that Power. And as in every heart-beat the univer- 
sal forces of chemistry come into play, as in every footstep 
the universal force of gravitation lays hold of us to keep us 
poised, as in every common sight and sound the universal 
force of light and the universal laws of undulation are in- 
voked, as in all ways physical we only live and move and 
have our being in virtue of that which is not we, — so is it 
with these still more secret, not less real, experiences* 



110 WRESTLING AND BLESSING. 

Surely, not less real are these inward correlations, this moral 
chemistry, by which, at the working of a man's will, pain 
is changed into patience and pity and cheer, temptation into 
safeguard, bitter into sweet feelings, weakness into strength, 
and sorrow into happier peace at last. Are these facts one 
whit less real than the facts of the body's growth ? A 
thousand hours of struggle in every year attest these facts 
for each one separately. Here also, as in the body's breath- 
ing and digestion, a Great Life joins on to our little life, 
maintaining it. It is we and the Not- We with us. Call it 
by what name we will, we depend, and can depend, on an 
Infinite Helpfulness in all our trying. The success we seek 
may fail for many reasons; but I feel sure that Eternal 
Powers adopt every right endeavor, or rather that every 
right endeavor plays into Eternal Powers of Right, and is 
thereby furthered toward that success which will really most 
bless you or me, the triers. If angels do not rejoice over 
us repenting and bear us up, as the Bible says, it is because 
the very Present Help that bears us up has a greater name 
than " angel," and is nearer than the heavens. No, not on 
us alone does all depend, — because, — because we never are 
alone. I suspect that, followed to its deepest source, our 
faith in the Goodness of the universe will be found breaking 
out from some such private experience, solitary in each one, 
but sure to come to each one that will have it, — that inward 
blessing follows pain and struggle. 

But it helps our faith to trace in others also this — law of 
transfiguration, shall I call it ? And if we wish such help, 
whom shall we look at? Two classes. First, the " self-made 
men," as they are styled, because from hard material they 
have forged their own success. They are our models of 
courage and persistence, of diligence and fortitude and 
temperance, of force and concentration. By these signs 



WRESTLING AND BLESSING. Ill 

they have conquered. We all recognize their victory, and 
gladly do them reverence. Their epitaphs might read, 
^' These men by wrestling accomplished all they undertook." 
But more reverently yet I look upon another class — the 
men who have tried as faithfully, and from the hard ma- 
terial have not won great success, that we can see ; the 
women who have worked, and working have never dreamed 
of gaining special victory. Perhaps they lacked some 
needful element of force ; but, quite possibly, all they have 
lacked is — a little selfishness. The world knows little of 
them. They count among the common lives, possibly even 
among the failures. Emphatically, they do not accomplish 
all they undertake. Only the few who are nearest know 
of their striving, and how truly the striving has crowned 
their brows. They themselves are not aware of coronation. 
They themselves only know that they have tried from day 
to day, and never seemed to do the day's whole duty, and 
that life has brought many hard problems, — but that now 
the problems are getting solved, and that it is quite possible 
to be happy, and yet have failed. They are humble usually, 
with an air of wistfulness in their eyes and in their talk, as 
of men who have been comforted by aspiration, not attain- 
ment. They have learnt to hope that 

** All instincts immature, 
All purposes unsure, 
All I can never be, 
All men ignore in me, — 
This I am worth to God." 

They have learned to hope that. They have learned that 
they will never do great things. Still if any hard thing is to 
be done, specially any burden to be borne, you will find them 
already there at work when you have made up your mind 
to go. They are great common-helpers. They think they 
know nothing, and truly they are not geniuses ; yet bright 



112 WRESTLING AND BLESSING. 

people in straits have a habit of coming to them for advice. 
Not rich, yet men and women whose practical aid in trouble 
is counted on without the asking. They are rare friends, 
because their minds are so rich with life's experience, theii* 
hearts so sweet with it. They speak the fitting word to us 
in our self-building, because there was once a scaffolding, 
long since taken down, by which they built that same part of 
themselves, and they remember all about the difficulty. 
They are better than a poem by Browning, or even that 
letter of Paul or the chapter in Epictetus, because here we 
meet the hero-force itself in brave original. 

I passed a woman in the street one day, and passed on, 
for she did not see me. But why not speak ? I thought, 
so back I turned ; and, besides the greeting, she dropped on 
me four sentences, such as we go to Emerson to read, — 
made me for the time four thoughts richer in three minutes. 
They were hfe distilled in words, her life distilled; though, 
she told me then and there that she " died" long before, — 
she seemed to herself of late years to do and to be so little. 
Perhaps she liad died, and I saw her immortality; for only 
the wings were wanting on the old shoulders. She had been 
a humbre struggler ; and, as I saw her, she seemed to wear 
a crown and the name -^Israel."' 

I will sum it up. Here is all my sermon, and in another 
woman's words. She calls her poem '• Treasures." 

"LqI me count mj treasures, 

All my soul holds dear, 
Given me by dark spirits 

Whom I used to fear. 

Through long days of anguish 

And sad nights did Pain 
Forge my shield Endurancey 

Bright and free from stain. 



WRESTLING AND BLESSING. 113 

Doubt in misty caverns, 

Mid dark horrors, sought, 
Till my peerless jewel 
Faith to me she brought. 

Sorrow, that I wearied 

Should remain so long, 
breathed my starry glory, 

The bright crown of Song. 

Strife, that racked my spirit 

Without hope or rest. 
Left the blooming flower 

Patience on my breast. 

Suffering, that I dreaded, 

Ignorant of her charms, 
Laid the fair child Pityy 

Smiling in my arms. 

So I count my treasures, 

Stored in days long past 
And I thank the givers 

Whom I know at last. 



THE DIVINE BENEDICTION. 



And the peace of God, wliicli passeth all understanding, shall 
guard your hearts and your thoughts in Christ Jesus. — Philip- 
pians IT : 7. 

Our Bible is a turbulent book. The Old Testament is a 
sea in wliicli the waves roll high. Even in its calmer con- 
ditions, the white caps are ever in view. Mid the din of 
earthly battles the turmoil of the spirit appears, restless long- 
ings of the heart, quenchless fires of hope and shame, the 
unceasing antagonisms of thought. Not less but more tur- 
bulent is the New Testament, because the contest has carried 
the flags inward, the line of battle is formed on spiritual 
rather than on material fields. 

And yet the great Bible word is peace ; over and over 
again do we come upon it; peace is the prophetic dream 
and almost the universal promise. According to Young's 
Concordance, the word occurs some one hundred and seventy- 
five times in the Old Testament and eighty-nine times in the 
New, forty-two of which occur in the letters of the first 
great soldier of the cross, the hunted, homeless and appar- 
ently friendless Paul. Although Jesus said, ^'I come not to 
bring peace but a sword", yet he went to his martyr death 
leaving behind him the serene promise, ^^ Peace I leave with 
you, my peace I give unto you." All this leads up to the 
text, which suggests. The Divine Benediction, ^' the peace of 
God, which passeth all understanding". We touch here the 
great paradox of religion. All lives, like those reflected in 
the Bible,are cast upon stormy seas. Stormy have been the 
centuries. Feverish are our years. Anxious are our days. 



THE DIVINE BENEDICTION. , 115 

How restless the heart of man ! how it spends distrustful days 
that end in sleepless nights ! and yet, peace is the hunger of 
the human heart; it is the pathetic cry of the souls. Surely 
"how beautiful on the mountains are the feet of them that 
publish peace". Now and then the spirit is permitted to 
receive the divine bonediction ; and these moments of realiza- 
tion give assurance that our wants are reasonable, and that 
the hunger may be satisfied. Peace is the endowment of re- 
ligion ; the peace strains of the Bible ever carry with them 
the religious refrain. Jesus and Paul, knowing peace, knew 
of something that politics, society and money can not give. 

The text suggests the first thing to be said concerning 
the peace of religion, the peace that is of God — viz.: "It 
passeth understanding." It is something deeper than know- 
ledge, it is not compassed by our reason. The most helpful 
view Chicago can offer is that indefinite line of vision far 
out in the lake where the water meets the sky. The finest 
line in every landscape is the horizon line. On the border 
land of thought lie the reverences. Where our petty cer- 
tainties end, there our holy worship begins. The child 
trusts father or mother, because in them it discovers a power 
it can not understand; it rests upon that reserve force it can 
not imitate or measure. When man or woman discovers 
in the other unexpected forces, a fervor unmeasured, a power 
of endurance unexpected, then love finds a divine resting 
place. The love that is trustworthy, that has the divine 
quality of lasting, is the love that rests on the foundation 
" which passeth understanding". To call for explanations 
or to try to measure, with the clumsy tools the brain afi'ords, 
profoundest verities of any moment in our lives is to pass 
out of the peace of God into the pitiable turmoils of men. 
The man loves the woman with a pure love when he finds 
in her a power he can not understand. The woman loves 
the man with a peaceful love when it rests on forces that 



116 THE DIVINE BENEDICTION. 

are beyond her measurement. We swim buoyantly in the 
sea in which, if we try to touch bottom, we shall be drown- 
ed. Music, art, companionship, owe their power to that 
which eludes analysis, ^' which passeth understanding.'* 
The simplest pleasures have a circumference too wide to be 
circumscribed by our compasses ; the color of the violet, the 
perfume of the rose, the flavor of the strawberry, bring a 
joy beyond our measuring and give a peace that transcends 
our reason, not because it is unreasonable, but because it 
springs from the same source as that from which reason 
comes. How much more does the peace-giving power of 
truth-seeking, right doing, and loving envelop our under- 
standing ; it encloses it, and consequently can not be encom- 
passed by it. When the lonely heart awakens to a sense of 
fellowship and its isolation is enveloped with kindred spirits ; 
when finiteness melts into infinitude ; when weakness feels 
the embrace of a love that is omnipotence ; when ignorance 
bows before infinite verities, and knowledge grows large 
enough to find its measureless ignorance ; then that knowl- 
edge is changed into the wisdom that is "better than 
riches ", the " peace that passeth understanding." The love 
that needs proving is not the love that brings peace. The 
God that is understood, that can be held in your terms and 
handled in my words, has no peace-producing power ; he is 
not God at all, as the jargon of the creeds, the quarrels of 
the sects, and the restlessness of the theologians amply 
prove. Who has not felt the truth of James Martineau's 
words when he said : 

^' Those who tell me too much about God ; who speak as if they 
knew his motive and his plan in everything; who are never at a 
loss to name the reason of every structure, and show the tender 
mercy of every event ; who praise the cleverness of the Eternal 
economy, and patronize it as a masterpiece of forensic ingenuity ; 
who carry themselves through the solemn glades of Providence? 



THE DIVINE BENEDICTION. 117 

"with the springy steps and jaunty air of a familiar ; do but drive 
me by the very definiteness of their assurance into an indefinite 
agony of doubt and impel me to cry, ' Ask of me less, and I shall 
give you all.' " 

In all this I mean no disrespect to the inquirer. There 
is no irreverence in thonghtfulness : I remember with Ten- 
nyson that 'Hhere is more faith in honest doubt than in halt 
the creeds." There is a wide difference between the reverence 
that is touched into life-mellowing power on the horizon line 
of knowledge found in the sub-soil of our being and the un- 
explored depths of experience, and the nervous clutch of 
timid souls, that grasp at a faith that conflicts with knowl- 
edge, shut their eyes in the temple of the soul lest they dis- 
cover blemishes in the altar. This is superstition ; that is re- 
ligion. The bigot is afraid to think ; the true devotee ot 
the nineteenth ' century is most afraid of thoughtlessness. 
Not he who distrusts the methods of reason, but he who 
follows every hue of investigation, finds at last all lines melt 
into transcendent beauty, all fade into the hallowed mystery 
that is pervaded with the peace of God. Not a sense of 
emptiness but of fullness rewards the investigator. The 
^' peace that passeth understanding" rests on the infinity of 
reality over there, not on the finiteness of our ignorance, 
which stops here. 

<* When loves great and small, 

Nine and ninety flew ope at our touch, 
Should the hundredth appall ? 

4f -x- -K- -x- •5«- -x- -K- 

*' I but open my eyes, and perfection, no more and no less. 
In the kind I imagined, full-fronts me, and God is seen God 
In the star, in the stone, in the flesh, in the soul and the clod. 
And thus looking within and around me, I ever renew 
(With that stoop of the soul which in bending upraises it too j 
The submission of man's nothing-perfect to God's all-complete, 



118 THE DIVINE BENEDICTION. 

As by each new obeisance in spirit, I climb to his feet." 

Let lis think more intently of these horizon lines that 
'' pass our understanding " which yield first a beauty and 
then the peace of God. Thus thinking, the world hangs to- 
gether better, the uniYeYse comes out, breaks upon the soul 
and claims it as its own. Short lines reveal the antagonisms 
of things, the friction of ideas, the contradiction of experi- 
ences. Long lines show things in their relations ; antagon- 
isms blend into harmonies, and the friction becomes the re- 
sult of blessed movement, the great wheels that move in the 
mechanism of Divine order. " The world is not all in pieces, 
but all together", says Bartol. I believe in science, but 
peace is the gift of religion ; because the method of the first 
is analytic, it pulls apart, it dismembers, it is in search of 
difi"erences. Religion — not theology, but religion — is syn- 
thetic ; it puts together, it rests in the Infinite Unity. The 
words holiness and wholeness are related. Peace comes 
when we take things in the large. It is well to know that 
oxygen and hydrogen are the component parts of water, but 
when our thirst is slaked, when we plunge and swim in glad 
freedom, these elements blend in unquestioned unity. Bless- 
ed be science, her work is most religious, but it is not re- 
ligion. We need the solvents in the laboratory to test our 
ores, to find our metals. Let the botanist destroy the one 
flower that he may better understand the beauty of its count- 
less companions in the field. Let the students have now 
and then a body to dissect, that the living tenement of the 
soul may be better understood and appreciated. But do 
not forget in any of these cases that ^' man puts asunder 
what God joins together." Division is in the thought, union 
is in the fact. Go in search of God with your microscope, 
seek him with your telescope, and you are pretty sure to miss 
him. Hold your love, human or divine, at arm's length, 



THE DIVINE BENEDICTION. 119 

try to test it witn your little probes, and the chances are 
that you will kill it altogether, you will not find it, not be- 
cause it is so small, but because it is so great. Your tools 
are the clumsy things. " Canst thou by searching find out. 
God? " asks the old sage. No, because he is in the search. 

'< Oh, where is the Sea? " tlie fishes cried, 

As they swam the crystal clearness through, 
*< We've heard from of old of the ocean's tide, 

And we long to look on. the waters blue. 

The wise ones speak of the infinite sea ; 

Oh, who can tell us if such there be ? '* 

The lark flew up in the morning bright. 
And sung and balanced on sunny wings ; 
And this was its song : *' I see the light, 
I look o' er a world of beautiful things ; 
But, flying and singing everywhere. 
In vain I have searched to find the air.'^ 

Herbert Spencer has called his system of philosophy 
"synthetic." John Fiske, his ablest interpreter, calls his 
work '' Cosmic Philosophy." These very names prophesy 
great religious outcome. They will eventually lead us 
not only in the "ways of wisdom" but into the "paths of 
peace." The old philosophies were analytic; based on them 
the theologians' work is still to divide ; they are trying to 
separate goats from sheep, heretic from Christian, theist 
from atheist. This is dreary business ; it brings such small 
returns ! The peace of God comes not on these lines. Dis- 
cordant notes become harmonious in the distancCjthe hard and 
cruel things to-day prove to be parts of a blessed providence ten 
years from to-day. That which is a puzzle in the life of the 
individual becomes principle in the history of the race ; the 
blackest pages of local history are the illuminating spots in 
the story of humanity. The impassioned faith of the apos- 
^\^ u Q^j. ligi^^ affliction, which is but for a moment, worketh 



120 THE DIVINE BENEDICTION. 

for us a far more exceeding and eternal weight of glory", is 
the simple lesson of the scientific student of history. Do 
not these long lines lead us to the peace of Grod ? I may 
not know why the road is rugged, but if it leads to the 
delectable mountains I will cheerfully climb, rocks and 
brambles notwithstanding. If it be true that 

*'By the thorn road, and none other, is the mount of vision won": 

I'm for the mount, all the same. If it be true, "No cross, 
no crown", we seek the crown notwithstanding. When I 
am immersed in my little troubles, and my heart is weak 
^ith loneliness, it does help to think how blessed have been 
the great troubles of the world, how wilderness wanderings 
have led to Canaan. Seven years of privations and war 
preceded the first century of a republic whose material growth 
is paralleled by its increasing hospitality to thought. Four 
years of awful battle, four millions of emancipated slaves! 
How little did the Continental soldier know of the republic! 
How short-sighted were the men of vision even during the 
last war ! Let us not begrudge tears if they fall on soul 
gardens that bloom more beautifully for the watering. Wel- 
come trouble, welcome loneliness, and the inexpressible pain 
it brings, if thereby somewhere, some time and to somebody 
it brings in some fuller measure "the peace of God that 
passeth understanding." 

I have yet touched but one end of this great truth. We 
must never forget the near end of the long line that leads to 
"the peace of Grod." The Greek word translated peace in 
my text, means also unity, concord. This leaves large re- 
sponsibility at the small end of things. Nay, the great end 
of things for you and me is the end at which we stand. 
We must put ourselves in line. The horizon glories array 
themselves only to eyes that are turned that way. Our lives 



THE DIVINE BENEDICTION. 121 

are fragments of the perfect whole ; if we invert or pervert 
them we mar the whole pattern. Our to-days and to-mor- 
rows are segments of eternity. As long as we think of our- 
selves as objects of some special spite, as neglected children, 
the unfortunate victims of bad luck, or even that we are 
tortured in some special way for mere discipline's sake, the 
^' peace of God" is not for us; but when we realize that we 
are linked to Jupiter, that the pulse in my wrist is a part of 
that rhythm that causes the tides of the Atlantic to ebb and 
flow, that the earthquake at Charleston was the working of 
the same force that lifted the Alleghanies and folded the 
geologic layers of the Rocky mountains, then shall we be 
prepared to enter into "the peace that passeth understand- 
ing; " then our human loves become a part of the Divine 
love. When we know that our life is engirdled with law, 
fortitude will change grief into resignation and defeat into 
triumph. If you would help a soul bear its sorrow, intro- 
duce it to a greater one. Put your small grievances into 
their proper perspective, and they cease to be grievances, 
because you have removed the stumbling block. It is not 
the province of religion to explain the ways of Grod to man; 
it is not for me to apologize for the universe; it is for us to 
recognize the facts. As we discover these, religion helps us 
to bear or to change them. Would you know the peace of 
God, realize that you are a part of that infinite majesty, 
strive to catch now and then a note of the heavenly melody, 
chant a stray chord of the infinite harmony, remember that 
everything beautiful springs from a beauty that is behind it, 
every strong will rises from a strength underneath, and all 
your loves are fed from the fountains of infinite love. And 
for yourself you may mar ihe beautiful or reflect it, you can 
either enter into the strength or become its victim, know the 
love or thwart it. We are impatient only when we forget 
the infinite patience, we are petulant when we turn away 



122 THE DIVINE BENEDICTION. 

from the unresting and unhasting stars that move in their 
unimpassioned orbits in darkest nights. We are discourag- 
ed when we fail to keep step with the solemn tramp of the 
generations. The wrong judgments of men hurt us not if 
we remember that the balances of Grod are justly poised. 
No thought of ours is insignificant if we reverently cradle it 
in the thought of God. No plan of ours will be abandoned 
if we are sure it is a part of the infinite plan. We have a 
will of our own, only when we believe it to be God's will 
also. 

A friend wrote me the other day from the heart of the 
Adirondacks, sitting on the grave of John Brown : " It is 
hard to put it all together — the human part of it into the 
setting ; — to think that from this cranny in the wilderness, 
a man not unlike all the farmers around went out and did 
the deed which begun and half won the war, and that deed 
done, was brought back here, is lying there under the sweet- 
briers, on the mound, with his name forever safe among the 
'mad men' of history, the heroes and the nation -shapers. 
Here they come, another party just driven up from some- 
where out in Sanity to see the grave, — two of them were 
not born when John Brown did it — nine hundred and forty 
of them so far this year." Thus it is that a man's small 
plans reach out into futurity, when they spring out of angel 
purposes; thus it is a mortal man casts an immortal shadow. 

"The great deed ne'er grows small", and every kind 
word, helpful smile, and guileless kiss, are great deeds, and 
they always will make for ''the peace that passeth under- 
standing", such as my friend found when the sunset glows 
rested upon the lowly grave in the valley of North Elbe, 
rimmed round by the great mountains. 

Poetry is not rhymed fancy but the higher truth, the 
truth within the facts, the thought that is not reached by 
thinking, the sensibility out of which sense springs, and so 



THE DIVINE BENEDICTION. 12B 

the poet is ever the truest interpreter of religion. He who 
sees the matchless harmony, the measureless power, and 
infinite delicacy all around him, sees God, but he who feels 
himself intricately dovetailed into all this, who realizes that 
man is the most intimate child of all the forces of Grod that 
play around us, knows '' the peace of God that passeth all 
understanding." 

'* Such a starved bank of moss 
Till, that May -morn, 
Blue ran the flash across : 
Violets were born ! 

** Sky — what a scowl of cloud 
TiU, near and far, 
Ray on ray split the shroud : 
Splendid, a star ! 

**World — how it walled about 
Life with disgrace 
TiU God's own smile came out : 
That was thy face 1 ' ' 

The beauty of the violet, the glory of the solitary star^ 
lead up to the fullness of the divine tenderness revealed in 
a woman's face, and this leads us inward to seek the sources 
of ^'the peace that passeth understanding." The power 
that taught the bird to build its nest, that surveyed the 
streets in the ant-village, guides us. 

** He is eyes for all who is eyes for the mole." 

Restless, weak, sinful man is more than bee or bird. That 
progressive teacher that instructed the woodpecker to exca- 
vate a home in the rotten tree ripened in man his reason. 
The granite palace and the public library are diviner mys- 
teries than the pine tree, as the state house is a more tow- 



124 THF DIVINE BENEDICTION. 



ering manifestation of the invisible God than the Rocky 
mountains. 

*' Knowest thou what wove yon woodbird's nest 
Of leaves and feathers from her breast ? 
Or how the fish outbuilt her shell, 
Painting with morn each annual cell ? 
Or how the sacred pine-tree adds 
To her old leaves new myriads? 
Such and so grew these holy piles, 
Whilst love and terror laid the tile:?. 
Earth proudly wears the Parthenon, 
As the best gem upon her zone." 

The best of all this is, that life enlarges and deepens most- 
ly through experience, not through the lore of books, but 
by the discipline of life. Grod writes his name upon the 
hearts of men with his own tools. As the rivulet scoops 
out the valley and molds the hill-side and carves the moun- 
tain face, so the stream of time sculptures the soul into 
grace and smooths the human heart into tenderness. One 
beautiful morning when the train stopped at Falls View to 
give the passengers a touch of that mighty majesty in nature, 
the Falls of Niagara, I helped out an old lady, who, on her 
way from Nova Scotia, was taking the first railroad ride in 
the eighty-three years of her life. She was coming west, as 
she cheerfully said, to die in the home of her son, who lived 
at Sandwich, Illinois. He was the only one left of the eight 
she had reared to manhood and womanhood. The passen- 
gers, as is their custom, soon fell into clusters on the brink 
of the precipice. There were young women just from 
school, who were profuse with their superlatives, "most 
splendid", "magnificent", "awful!" There were young 
men who jumped, clapped their hands, threw up their caps 
and hurrahed. The middle aged were awed into more rever- 
ential manners, and made their comments to one another in 



THE DIVINE BENEDICTION. 125 

subdued undertones. I watched and waited to see what 
powers of interpretation eighty-three toilful and tearful years 
had given to this simple soul, the venerable grandmother, 
the mother of seven buried children. Aye, in vain do we 
attempt to fathom the meaning of these words, " seven bur- 
ied children " ! She stood silent and motionless. I watched 
the furrowed face, but no gleam of emotion came to the sur- 
face. At last the bell rang, and as she turned she said, with 
traces of tears in her voice, but none in her eyes — I think 
tears do not readily reach the surface in the eighties — 
" Mister, what a deal of troubled waters is there", and that 
was all. Ah, the seething, tumbling, unceasing roar of that 
outward Niagara must have started again the memories of 
the still greater Niagara of life, unseen to outward eye, un- 
known to all the rest of the world, but to her tempestuous 
with its grief. In its stream rebellious passions boiled, 
clamorous wants and misty longings had channeled their 
chasms in her heart, and more than once deafened her ears 
to all other sounds. 

Well hast thou interpreted, venerable grandmother ! Sub- 
lime is the immobility secured through the knowledge of a 
still greater cataract ! Yes, there is a '' deal of troubled wa- 
ers" at Niagara, but you know of another river — 

'' whose waters were a torrent 
Sweeping thro' your life amain.'* 

Farther down the waters of Niagara cease their troubling; 
eddies, whirlpools, fretting isles and jutting rocks are all 
passed, and even the troubled waters of Niagara find peace 
at last in the bosom of the great ocean. Poised and puri- 
fied it rests in the arms of infinite law, 

*«And still it moves, a broadening flood; 
And fresher, fuller grows, 



126 THE DIVINE BENEDICTION. 



A sense as if the sea were near, 
Towards which the river flows. 

'* thou, who art the secret source 
That rises in each soul, 
Thou art the Ocean, too, — thy charm, 
That ever deepening roll!" 

So in lowliest lives we find foundations for "the peace 
that passeth all understanding." In life, in its meanest es- 
tate, besmirched with passion, distraught with misplaced 
confidences, weakened with unrequited loves, back of the 
heggarly rags of inebriety, we may overhear the groans of 
the imprisoned spirit : we may detect the blush long since 
retreated from the face, still haunting with its re-demptive 
glow some of the inner recesses of heart and brain; so 
we who have already been taught that there is that which 
has high uses for lowly things which conserves the beautiful 
in coarsest elements, we come back to that "peace that passeth 
Tinderstanding," and believe that 

'* warm 
Beneath the veriest ash, there hides a spark of soul, 
Which, quickened by love's breath,may yet pervade the whole 
0' the gray, and, free again, be fire." 

Then, in common with the noblest prophets of all religion, 
we shall have a growing faith in the possibilities of human 
nature, a deep confidence that underneath all sin there lies 
the God-like essence in man, and in the face of all the hor- 
rid facts of the police-court and the prison, the wretched 
abuse of human confidence, the brutal staining of human in- 
nocence, we will believe that 

** a sun will pierce 
The thickest cloud earth ever stretched ; 
That what began best, can't end worst, 
Norwhat-God blessed once prove accurst." 



THE DIVINE BENEDICTION. 127 

Yes, the faithful dog that asks for one sympathetic pat 
upon its head; the child that nestles in your lap, the man 
whose arm lovingly sustains you, the woman whose lips are 
graciously tendered you to kiss,— these little threads of ce- 
lestial origin weave for us heavenly garments, and our dear, 
earthly loves become celestial by-ways beyond our under- 
standing. Grod's own love comes to us through the lowliest 
door, and the arms of the Eternal embrace us in the babe's 
clasp. 

And still we climb, and still the divine benediction salutes 
us, embosoms us. If science ever melts into a sense of infi- 
nite reality ; if highest intelligence kneels in devout confes- 
sion of ignorance, if the shyest human love knows no boun- 
daries between it and the love of Grod, how surely will the 
high endeavor of conscience land us at the feet of Omnipo- 
tence, and give us "the peace of God that passeth all under- 
standing"! Follow duty if you would know the Christ-like 
calm in the presence of wrong; follow duty if you would 
change resentment into patience, resistance into forgiveness. 
Duty is the great mountain road to God. " When we cease 
to long for perfection, corruption sure and speedy leads 
from life to death," says William Morris. He who does 
not turn a willing ear to the voice of conscience will soon 
miss the divine on every hand. Music, poetry, painting, 
sculpture, science, one after the other will silently close their 
doors in the face of him who does not seek the right. The 
^' peace of God" shines most visibly on the brow of the 
brave. See it when Abraham Lincoln strikes the shackles 
from off human limbs. See it make noble the great Glad- 
stone as he stands up in the face of centuries of wrong to 
plead for the right of those who fail to exact it for them- 
selves. Do your duty, else no knowledge, beauty or love 
will ever lead you to the peace of God. He who says, " I 
may not be great ; I may miss all peace, but I will be true," 



128 THE DIVINE BENEDICTION. 

stands at the altar from which the divine benediction is ever 
pronounced. 

Lastly, following the quest for the divine benediction, 
even what the blessed old book calls the "last enemy" turns 
out to be no enemy after all, but a friend. Chastened lives 
are better than merry ones; earnest souls are more needed 
than happy ones. Somehow beyond my understanding I 
am sure that peace is the reward of that chastened life. I 
love this earth and the life rooted therein, its sunshine and 
its flowers, its dear terrestrial loves and its high terrestrial 
duties, and it is tragic to sever these ties. But on the hori- 
zon line I feel sure that the tragedy melts into tenderness, 
that on the death-heights there lies repose, and even on bat- 
tle days there is peace beyond the clouds. The tears we 
shed at the grave ritay drop on celestial fields and may help 
grow the grain we fain had garnered here. What we must 
leave undone here may be the better done there. 

** On the earth the broken arcs ; in the heaven the perfect round. 

Once when I had tried to say something like this in a 
sermon a listener came to me with a grateful but dis- 
appointed face, saying: "I believe it's true, all true, but 
how is one to feel it ? I can not see it, what can I do to 
see it?" I could only reply: "We can only catch glimpses 
of it now and here. Only on rare truth-seeing and truth- 
telling moments will the apparently conflicting lines com- 
bine in the higher unity. My listener's solicitations remind- 
ed me of that one day that was given me to taste Alpine 
delights. One little day out of a lifetime into which the anti- 
cipations and dreams of years gone were to be compressed, 
and out of which the recollections of years were to be drawn. 
Of course I was out of bed long before day-light,because I had 
but the one day to do that for which the complacent sleepers 
around me had weeks and months. I began the day by go- 



THE DIVINE BENEDICTION. 129 

ing in search of that mighty work of Thorwaldsen, the most 
impressive product of the chisel I have ever seen or expect 
to see. I traced its hnes on the solid rock in the first grey 
of early dawn, and then hastened to catch the first boat on 
Lake Luzerne that was to leave me at Waggis, for I was to 
make the top of Riga by the right of climbing. I disdained 
an elevated railway. It was a cold, foggy, threatening 
morning. The captain shook his head as he tried to tell 
me in broken English that Riga had not unveiled her glory 
for five days. I began the ascent expecting to be contented 
with the fatigue of the climb, though no view were given 
me. I had the fog, and, part of the way, the rain all to my- 
self; bits of near ruggedness tantalized and detained me, but 
no distant glories, no mountain vistas were possible. 

I could hear the tinkling of cow-bells in deep chasms be- 
low me into which I could not look, and occasionally the call 
of goat-herds came from the heights above me where I could 
not see. Near surprises constantly delighted me; here and 
there I was helped and touched inexpressibly by the wayside 
shrines erected for the encouragement of the herders who 
sought the uplands for their pasturage, long before those 
heights were sought for their beauty. In those foggy, en- 
veloped fastnesses I was as good a Catholic as any one. 
The crude art, the rustic image of Mary, the weather-eaten 
crucifix were bathed in reverence, redolent with a piety that 
was as much mine as that of those who reared it centuries 
ago, and who: to-day claim exclusive monopoly of the symbol- 
ism. After a while I got a glass of goat's milk and a piece 
of black bread from a mountaineer, in lieu of the breakfast 
I did not stop to eat ; and still I climbed, the fog so dense at 
times that I could scarcely see the slender trail a few yards 
ahead of me. Two hours and a half, three hours, and still 
no break in the clouds. The dampness had reached through 
my clothing, the spirit was growing chilly as well as the 



130 THE DIVINE BENEDICTION. 

body. I heard voices above me. They were talking Eng- 
hsh; they were coming toward me; they were descending, 
cross and disappointed; they advised me to turn around and 
go down with them. They laughed at my persistence in 
keeping on, for had they not been up there two days and 
two nights, and was it not darker this morning than it had 
been at all ? But this was my one day. I would make an 
Alpine summit, though no vision was granted. Another 
half hour of fog and the mist relented a little. Again I 
could hear voices away above me ; I was approaching one of 
the inns on the way. Suddenly I came upon a very little 
boy crying piteously. His herd of a dozen goats with dis- 
tended udders would not be driven up the hill to be milked. 
While he was driving or pulling one a few yards upward, 
another in search of a neglected tuft of grass would with 
nimble feet descend the crag up which he had driven her 
with so much labor. I tried to speak a kind word to him, 
but my English made hini cry all the harder, and when I 
tried my Grerman on him he screamed, and, to tell the truth, 
his crying made me^ think that our feelings were very much 
alike. I wanted to cry from sheer loneliness and disappoint- 
ment. Fortunately my English frightened the goats as well 
as the boy. Not feeling good for anything else I was glad 
to become goat-herd, and so I drove them right royally, 
while the small boy followed ungraciously a long way be- 
hind as if still suspicious of the sanity of one who could not 
talk better than I could. A warmer glow came into the 
atmosphere, things assumed more definite outline, the little 
mountain station was revealing itself above me. Panting 
and out of breath I sat down to rest on a big rock. After 
a few moments I turned to look for the boy; when, lo! 
there they stood all before me, about me, above me, the en- 
tire system of the Bernese Alps — Pilatus, the Wetterhorn, 
the Grlarnisch — a hundred and twenty miles of them, like a 



THE DININE BENEDICTION. 131 



line of white-hooded nuns kneeling at prayer, and — 

** O'er night's brim day boiled at last, 
Boiled pure gold o'er the cloud-cup's brim, 
Where spirting and suppressed it lay. 

* ■5f ^ ^ -x- 

Forth one wavelet, then another curled. 
Till the whole sunrise, not to be suppressed, 
Rose-reddened, and its seething breast 
Flickered in bounds, grew gold, then overflowed the 
world." 

Such is the answer I would make to the friend who asks 
to be shown the unity that over-arches all our discord, who 
begs for the revelation which would bring the "peace that 
passeth understanding." Life is a short day's climbing; 
mists and rain envelop us; often we toil up expecting small 
returns, doubting at times the existence of mountain ranges, 
content at last to become humble herders of a few goats 
perchance. Then suddenly the simple task is overtaken 
with a glad surprise. A halt, an unexpected turn, and a 
revelation breaks upon us, and then our years stand around 
draped in white, capped with Alpine splendors, and the 
whiteness of their peaks is not miracle or dogma, not creed, 
sect or text, not the hope of heaven or the fear of hell, not 
a devil overcome or a distant God reconciled by the vicari- 
ous flow of a savior's blood, but the celestial commonplaces 
of earthly duties and human privileges. A mother's love, a 
father's manly care, the love of home and children, the heart 
ties, soft as silk but strong as iron, that either bind us to 
Grod, or mangle and cripple us as we heed or defy them. 
These bring us the "peace of God which passeth all under- 
standing", and, to complete the thought of the text, ganison 
our hearts and our thoughts in the ideal, the Christ Jesus 
of the soul. 



ROBERT BROWNING. 



We have by a recent arrangement become Chicago agents 
for the London Browning Society's publications, and invite 
attention to the following list of pamphlets which we have 
now on hand. 

MONTHLY ABSTRACTS OF THE PROCEEDINGS OF THE 
BROWNING SOCIETY. 

Leaflets of four to twelve pages each, giving reports of the 
informal discussions of papers at the London Browning Soci- 
ety. Twenty-four numbers are now on hand, and will be 
mailed to any address for $1.00. Ten numbers, 50 cents. All 
these Abstracts, with other matter of interest, are included in the 

BROWNING SOCIETY PAPERS. 

Parts I, II, III, IV, V and VII are now ready. Price per 
part, to non-members, $2.50 postpaid. We have also Part I 
of the 

ILLUSTRATIONS TO BROWNING'S POEMS, 

the price of which is $2.50. Any of the above can be secured 
at half price by acquiring 

ANNUAL MEMBERSHIP IN THE LONDON SOCIETY, 

which further entitles the member to two copies of all the 
publications issued by the society during the current year. 
Membership fees, $5.50, which may be remitted through us. 

CHICAGO PUBLICATIONS. 

Robert Browning'' s Poetry. Outline studies published for 
the Chicago Browning Society. Paper, 25 cents; cloth, 50 
cents; postpaid. 

" Seed Thoughts'^'' from Browning and others. Selected by 
Mary E. Burt. Paper, 62 pages, decorated cover, 30c., postpaid. 

Broivning'' s Selected Poems. Red Line edition, full gilt, 
$1.00, postpaid. 

Browning'' s Women, By Mary E. Burt, $1.00, postpaid. 
Ready in December. 

CHARLES H. KERR & CO., PUBLISHERS, 
175 Dearborn Street, Chicago. 



UNITY CLUBS. 



UNITY CLUBS: 



The "Unity Club " is a Western institution, still in its infancy but rapid- 
ly growing. Historically, its origin has been connected with the Liberal 
Christian churches in Wisconsin, Minnesota, Illinois and other neighbor- 
ing states, but logically the name implies merely the purpose of uniting' 
effort in reading, study, and interchange of thought, and this united effort 
may be made equally well by those of different churches or no church, though 
practically it will be found that such clubs can be most readily formed by 
a group of personal acquaintances such as would naturally be found in a 
common church. 

Members of this growing circle of clubs have prepared for each other's 
use a series of pamphlets as guides in the study of favorite subjects. Intro- 
ductory to the rest is one entitled 
or Mutual Improvement Societies 
in Town and Church, by Emma Endicott Marean. This leaflet contains 
in small compass many practical hints for the guidance of those desiring to 
form new clubs, A succinct list of '*Ten Commandents " for literary cir- 
cles is a valuable feature. 

It contains also a descriptive list of our other leaflets for clubs, the titles 
of which may be summarized : Outline Studies in Lowell, ioc. ; in Holmes, 
Bryant and Whittier, ioc.; in George Eliot, ioc.; in Robert 
Browning's Poetry, 25c. ; in Politics, ioc. ; Ten Great Novels, a guide 
to English fiction, loc. ; The Masque of the Year, ioc. ; The Legeni> 
of Hamlet, giving side-light for Shakespeare students, 25c. New leaflet* 
will be issued from time to time as demand arises. 

Price OF "Unity Clubs," post-paid, 10 cents. 

CHARLES H. KERR & CO., Publishers, 

171; Dearborn st., Chicago, 



MANUAL TRAINING IN EDUCATION. 

By JAMES VILA BLAKE. 

With a Preface by Prof. C. M. Woodward, Director 
OF THE Manual Training School of St. Louis. 



OPINIONS: 



" The tendency of thoughtful and observant people is wel^ 
shown in this modest little volume of Mr. Blake's. He has 
here given the result of his own vigorous thinking on what he 
has observed in himself and in others. We were students to- 
gether at Harvard, and through widely different personal ex- 
periences we have reached the common ground of a belief in 
the universal value of manual training as an element in at ruly 
liberal education." — P^of, C. M. Woodward. 

" Through the hand to the mind is the educational route 
now pursued with great success, and experience has shown it 
to be the natural method, and the one most truly uniting and 
developing the mental and manual powers, by making them 
mutually dependent. Mr. Blake presents the facts logically 
and carefully, with a view to gain new converts." — Book Chat. 

" The little volume, from its style and from the new point 
of view from which the author treats of manual training, de- 
serves to be widely read." — Omaha Republican. 

"Not only timely, but specially interesting." — Grand 
Rapids Eagle. 

" May be heartily recommended to all who are interested 
in the subject." — Wisconsifi Journal of Education, 

*' The author writes clearly and forcibly, and his views de- 
serve attention." — Worcester Daily Spy. 

" A convenient and well digested presentation of a vital 
topic." — Michigan Christian Advocate. 

Price in paper, 25 cents; in cloth, 50 cents; postage free. 

Charles H. Kerr & Co., Publishers, 

175 Dearborn Street, Chicago. 



THE MORALS OF CHRIST. 

A Comparison with Contemporaneous Systems. 
By Austin Bierbower. 



SOME PRESS OPINIONS. 

An admirable example of the scientific treatment of a historical subiect 

almost as systematic as a treatise upon one of the great sciences.— Z>a//K 

A remarkably sugg-estive and striking treatise. Mr. Bierbower has done 
the work which needed to be done.— iV^. T. Independent. 

One of the most notable works of the period, remarkable for its unique- 
ness as well as high literary character. It may be doubted if anothe? so 
thoroughly non-controversial work on Christ's teachings can be found in 
the entire range of tne literature of the Christian ev2i.-- Inter Ocean. 

ihe book is one of great sug-gestiveness.— CW//V. 

The whole is written in a crisp, epigrammatic way that serves to keen the 
reader s interest closely through the whole inquiry.— C/4/Va^^ Times. 

Ihe book has many striking excellencies.— /«//r/<7r 

The workis exceedingly well written. The pointed, epigrammatic phrase- 
ology, m which the rich contents are placed before the mind of the reader, 
is an insurance against weariness and security for unflagging interest.— T/^^ 
Standard, 

An interesting and forcible book, in which the a.uthor undertakes to dif- 
ferentiate Christ's morality from the Jewish or childish, the pharisaic or ec- 
clesiastic and the Graeco-Roman or worldly. Much of the distinction is 
of value. — Atlantic Monthly. 

Mr. Austin Bierbower, the author of this book, writes in commendably 
clear and telling sentences, and many will be attracted to his chapters by 
this style. * * It is suggestive and stimulating, and it approaches 
its subject from an unusual direction. — The Co7i^reoratio7ialist. 

We like to look often into Mr. Bierbower's ''Morals of Christ.'* The 
titles in the table of contents form a suggestive syllabus of ethics. — Unity. 

Mr. Bierbow^er is known as a very independent and suggestive thinker. 

* * His book \ve can cordially commend as stim.ulating and thought- 
ful, and likely to be useful to readers who are accustomed to do their ow^n 
thinking. — Christian Union, 

The book, a note-worthy one, abounds in strikingly suggestive headings. 

* * The points are fine and strongly taken. It draws such sharp dis- 
tinction that it may be charged occasionally with over-statement, * ^ * 
But here 'is the accrescence of a remarkably clear, fresh, discriminating 
and sententious style. — The Advance. 

Mr. Bierbower's timely book is just what was needed. His comparison of 
Christian with ancient secular ethics is at once scholarly, scientific and emi- 
nently judicioiJ§. * * Mr. Bierbower's method of attack is bold and 
spirited, his analysis keen and searching, his style unconventioned, breezy, 
fresh, and the treatment systematic from the first to the last. The work 
is both scientifi^and popular. — Mind iti Nature. 

Paper, 200 pag^s, 50 cents, post-paid. 

CHARLES H, KERR & Co., Publishers, 175 Dearborn st., Chicago. 



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